From Thoughts to Words

Bedtime.

Think about when you were a much younger child--when you had a bedtime. 

Think about how much time you spent sleeping and taking naps at that age. Most likely, it was profoundly more than you do now. As kids, we spent so much time just running around cheerfully without a thought of what was happening around us, or even what was happening TO us. We were so energetic and full of life; so much, that we needed ample rest to regain our strength. This youthful strength never seemed to deteriorate from our bodies; within minutes, it would always bounce back into our systems as instantaneously as the snap of an elastic band against our skin. With this; we could wander and explore the worlds, our worlds; not just the world we'd been given, but all the worlds we'd created. We could frolic and fall onto our knees; which would scab, bruise, and then heal before we even knew it... before it even hurt. We were living in a shell so small, yet seeing the world so much larger than anyone bigger than us could. We could see anything, be anything, and do anything... until the elastic stretched out too far, and until our weak and weary bodies tired out. Until bed time.

As you grow older, your bedtime becomes later and later. Then when you're an adult, it disappears completely.

I think that this means something. 

I think that because children have a bedtime, this is why they are happier than us. They don't just sleep more. They sleep more. 
They dream more.

The imagination of a child is much wider than an adults'; because they don't know as much. In all the vacancy of things they don't know, the spectrums of their minds are nearly infinite. As we grow up, our imagination shrinks in order to make room for the things we learn through our growth; knowledge, rationality, reasoning, and responsibilities. We lose all our time to our obligations we've been told to worry about. We lose all our sleep to work on things we don't even want to do, but need to. We lose all our imagination to the rules we've been taught to follow. And we have lose our dreams to the ideas we've been told to believe; to all the things we've learned, and aren't supposed to question. 

We've lost our dreams to our reality.

We used to question things; we used to question EVERYTHING, and even when we got our answers, we still didn't know what was true. Back then, doubt was a beautiful thing, because not knowing things wasn't a danger. It was simply a blank in our minds that left pages for us to color in our own ideas and thoughts; not just the ones we'd been conditioned with. We had room to make up our own answers based on our personal thoughts--and it was okay if they were wrong, because it was okay that we didn't know everything. Everything was okay. 

We were first born with empty minds, void of any consciousness or perception. So, there were some empty spaces of everything we didn't understand; spaces waiting to be filled with the knowledge we had yet to learn. Although, before they could be filled, all we had was our untouched imagination. Pure, uncorrupted, vast imagination. Our main resource was our own ignorant and irrational explanations to make sense of anything unexplained. And that was okay. It was okay to be uncertain about anything because we were uncertain everything. When we were kids; doubt and uncertainty was a beautiful thing, and what we filled that emptiness in our mind with was conceived from only our perfectly distorted design. All original, eccentric, and created by ourselves; no facts, no systems, no preconceived intentions. It was just pure open-mindedness, free from being dictated or conformed by what was proven 'right or wrong', 'true or false', 'possible or impossible'. 

No. Anything was possible. 

Here's the difference. When you're young, your foolishness is called optimistic. When you're older, your optimism is called foolish. Our dreams go from being possible to being unrealistic, or simply impossible. When we start learning what is real and unreal, we're then made to stop believing in our fantasies. Growing up, and maturing is supposed to gradually fill those gaps of all the things we couldn't comprehend as a kid. We go from coloring books to textbooks; as we learn what is possible and impossible; we're told to stop using colors, and start seeing things as black and white. When we're taught what is right and wrong; we're forced to stop drawing our own outlines of the future, and start writing inside the lines... But I fear that all those blank spaces and empty gaps in our brains were the only places we had left to fill with hope. They were each a white canvas where we could free our passions without following an order, or system.