***Insight*** Losing Luster

Looking back into my childhood, I realize how magical, open and infinite the world seemed. My dreams felt as if they were just out of reach, no matter how outrageous and there was something new to be found everywhere. Every day, every season, seemed different and vibrant in its own unique way that I had never before. Everything was like a wash of color, free of inhibitions.

Pondering my life now is almost depressing. The things that I once found amazing and amusing now seem dull and lifeless, utterly uninteresting. The seasons may cycle but they fall into a definite and inescapable routine. I'm inside all the time. I look at the same computer screen, look at the same pile of books, doing everything as if in tempo with an unseen metronome, dancing like a puppet on a string. My Master? Schedules, and time. Time is now an undeniable force. No longer can I choose to ignore it. It no longer seems invisible or unreal.

All the color seems to have drained from my life, it's now the color of a rusting antique or those last dying rays of golden sunlight in the twilight, desperately trying to live with their former vigor and brilliance, but slowly dimming and failing.

The luster life once had now seems to have vanished.

And yet, I feel as if I've heard this joke before. I may be in a prison, but there's still an outside world, even if i can't comprehend it beyond the gray, windowless walls and iron bars.

So what if I've explored every frozen crevasse of the tip of this iceberg? What lies below the icy waters? So what if I can't see anything past the flatness of the horizons I see? Does that mean I shall believe the world is flat? Am I prideful enough that I can say to myself that I have tasted all that is good in life already? That there is not more to be had? To be learned? To be lived?

There are books to read, people to meet, places to go, novels to write, pictures to paint, music to write, lives to change, skies to soar, mysteries to explore, dreams to dream, and a world to shape.

So while I know the oppression of time, and know I have obligations to fill and duties to perform, will I give in to my self-illusion of dullness? Will I doomed my life to fade into gray? If I do, I don't think my life will ever know color again.