Second innocence is a turning point, a simple choice, but it also involves a good deal of hard work and discipline to integrate this way of being into your life. Each day we must find ways to choose innocence over cynicism. . . . Whether we are young or old, we always live in a daily tension between idealism and cynicism, joy and despair, faith and unbelief, wonder and boredom, and the choice to see goodness or evil in the world we inhabit. So second innocence is the experience of claiming hope and wonder again and again in the different realms and moments in which our lives are lived.
— John Izzo, Second Innocence