Oh my god, do you remember how powerful you used to be? How everyone loved you, or hated you, but never ignored you? Remember how your life used to be neck deep in epic adventures, and everything was incredible?And now you’re old.

Everything is greyish and clammy. Your hot and cold have become tepid. Life is full of tolerable comforts and quiet desperation now, and you long for the Good Old Days when colors were bright and the earth shook when you walked.

Or is it really so?

Has your fire really gone out? When you were young your fires burnt so hot and bright that everything you touched glowed with passion, but now it seems your fires barely light the walls, let alone warm them. Is that gloom seeping into your bones the cause of your depression, or the effect of it?

When you were young. Let’s start with that. Youth has the benefit of very thick and heavy blinders that provide focus but also block out most of what’s going on around you. When you were young, your world was very small. Your world consisted of you. Then there was a small circle around you, a circle of minor concerns such as friends and social dynamics. Your job was a minor inconvenience, something you went and donated face time to in order to keep the rent paid. Like it or not, your world was very small when you were young.

Let’s go back further, to when you were a child. Mom and Dad took care of everything. You were fed. You had a house. You had toys and clothes and all these things were just there for you, and you could take for granted that there would always be provisions available. YOUR concerns were playing and reading, and trying to figure out where your favorite toy went. Your world was practically microscopic.

When you were a child, there was nothing in your world you couldn’t interact with. This is the way you remember it, but your memory is limited to what you could personally experience. Maybe you remember seeing something on teevee about the Iran Hostage Crisis, but you saw lots of things on teevee. That was just teevee. It wasn’t part of YOUR world. Your world ended at the edge of your yard, and it was all yours.

You’re older now, and it seems that your power has diminished, that your fire has practically gone out. Yet this is only a matter of perspective. When you were young, your fire only had to provide light and warmth for a single room, but now you have a whole house to fill and sometimes the cold and dark places make you feel as if you’re just not up to the task anymore. You simply don’t have enough fire to fill your world, not because your fire has gone out but because your world is so much larger than it once was.

When the darkness creeps in from the corners of your life, it’s time to draw your world back to that one room. To remember what’s really important in your life. Draw your world back to that one room, and you’ll see that your fire is nowhere near close to going out. If anything, it’s hotter and brighter than ever before. If you live in YOUR room, minding your own business and not wasting your fire everywhere else, you’ll find you have more than enough heat and light to accomplish anything, and sometimes you even need to open a door and let your fire out so it doesn’t burn you up.