He trailed too low and missed the mark, forsaking the peak above.

It is rare to find a grown up man who hasn’t lost the love for all that is primordial. Or rather, it is rare to find one who is still wholly enamored with that which is most simple in life. Like the child, the young one who suckles on the sap of simplicity. The novelty is there, for it is genuinely new. All things are seemingly glazed and glittered like gifts. An action, whatever it may be, will have both value and purpose for its own sake. It is this lack of pretense, where what is before the child matters most, that we find the gleeful cheer of someone impressed by the marvels of reality.

Men are busy in their heads, crowded by a mob of worriers, hunters and idlers. These chains of associations have been built of the hardest iron, weighing on a man both night and day. The richness of what was in the spring and summer of his life, or so to speak his youth, has been shed like old skin. Schemes and concerns muster up sour soup which only deadens his appreciation for the pebbles below his feet. He stomps recklessly and carelessly, fiddling with the loose change in his pocket, wondering if lady luck will favour him tonight.

The scenes our minds construe are all quite made up. We are, in a very true sense, conjuring fairy-tales and fantasies on a nearly endless pace. A man takes reality and learns to stretch it, contort it, and exaggerate its soft edges into a strange caricature. Light is seen as colour, and colour as shade. And so the truth of any moment is blemished by distractions and fabrications; a rose-coloured lens by which all of today is seen as yesterday, and all of tomorrow as today. The song is unsung, for a man is too busy with the melted plastic he thinks to be a mirror.

What all this fashionable prose attempts to convey is that, like a child, we ought to remember to stop ourselves in our tracks. In all moments lies a subtle bliss, an opportunity which affords appreciation. A simple action, be it a movement, a thought, an emotion, or perhaps a sensation, holds a clever merit which a man might still learn many things from experiencing firsthand. To genuinely experience such a thing is to be awake to it. If a man wraps his arms around the experience and holds tight, then he is being authentic. This is quite different from the half-steeped attention to which we typically refer.

The rhyme has merit and the rhythm has reason. Boredom is the absence of any residual care for either. It is a condition to be loathed and pitied, not approved as normality. Men who run from it are cowards, seeking endless idle distractions. Those who resist and fight it are counted among the brave or, at the very least, the well-intentioned. Society asks us to follow the stroke of its pen and to focus on the paint it pours over the sober reality of nature. It makes us believe a million things which matter not, and hopes with all its genius that men will congregate in worship of its offerings. But society, in and of itself, is certainly unreal.