It use to be about thinking things- imagining, with some element of creativity, what life was - what it might be - perhaps idealized notions and fanciful proclamations. Assumptions. Expectations mixed up with criticism. Eyes opening wide to revelations of the dark and sinister; and also the mystical and mysterious. Did all that get shut down, or faded out to a dull grey noise in the ignorable back country of perception? What whipped me into submission? No visible hand wealds force against me-no foe or master is manifest to control me. Yet some force acts on me like a persistent hammer blow. It is as if my soul wants to straighten me up to see above the heads of my huddled mass-ness, to rise to those heights that seemed obtainable in youthful years, but the hammer strikes where the head pops up. (whack a mole) Stay in line in the wasteland of thou shall.
But it isn’t actually like this. I am no less able to fly now than I ever was. Except for perception. A delusional condition of less-ness. I have somehow, by some mechanism, made my own submission to a cowered servitude in a mechanized consumerism - a squirrel cage of work and purchase, work and purchase, and so goes the vital life and precious time out of me. Ten years. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. And here I am driving endless miles in loops around this metropolis. Paying endless fees and bills and taxes. Endless consumption and endless dull appetite. I am settled to be full at the expense of being nourished. And this fullness dulls me to the slow clogging of arteries and the strain of blood pressure - the dull aching of spiritual hunger and the drowning out of the still quiet voice. I dull myself with quantities and junk distractions to the distress signals sounding from my spirit.

There is nothing I can change about the present moment except my conscious awareness of what the present moment actual is, which can change everything about the present moment.