The fire has gone out of my days.

You do everything you are meant to, and feel almost nothing about any of it. Not sad, exactly. Tepid. The colours have gone grey, the food has lost its taste, and you move through the motions of a life you cannot quite feel.

The fire has not gone out. It is banked, covered over by the long grey of doing without feeling. Numbness is not the absence of fire. It is fire that has been asked to sleep too long.

Wonder is not a luxury. It is yours, and it comes back not through some grand event but through attention, one real thing noticed fully, until the noticing wakes the rest.