Echoes of a Carrousel

Ils disent que la vie est un carrousel
Elle tourne vite, et tu dois rester dessus
Le monde est plein de rois et de reines
Qui t'aveuglent et volent tes rêves
c'est le paradis et c'est l'enfer

Et ils vont te dire que le noir est vraiment blanc
Que la lune est juste le soleil la nuit
Que quand tu marches dans des couloirs dorés
Tu dois garder l'or qui tombe
C'est le paradis et l'enfer

It was windy that night, yet for some reason it was not cold. The air was filled with something beyond words. It was as if there was some sort of indescribable energy came from that old carrousel: the resonant echo of the children’s laughter, the smell of roasted chestnuts, and the careless, yet serene smile on the faces of the passers-by. It was in many ways a return to childhood – a return to innocence, something that is almost nonexistent today, something that only lives in our memories.

Life essentially is that same carrousel which we once rode as children, except that as time moved on we got a little older, and in return, the carrousel got a little faster. We have become so preoccupied with clinging on, that we seem to have forgotten why we essentially chose to hop on the ride in the first place. Irrational fear seems to have penetrated past our flesh and straight into the bones; our raison d’être having become nothing but a means of maintaining the status quo selfishly driven by this foolishly egotistical phobia. In essence, we have deprived no one but ourselves of the real joys of this carrousel by consciously choosing to constrict ourselves to only the flat, two-dimensional aspects within the realms of time and space.

In today’s world, time has become nothing but a shallow synonym for a conniving foe whose only reason for existence is to loot us of our own. However, time should never be condescended and deprived of its profound qualities of relativity and arbitrariness: while some things seem to happen in a second, others appear to last a lifetime. Essentially that perception of time and space, then and there, is what differentiates those who take pleasure in riding the carrousel and those who merely hold on to it with every last tense muscle in their bodies.