Eyes Wide Shut

I don't understand.

When I was a kid, my life was like a little garden path; it just went straight ahead of me. It was sunny, and was bordered with flowers. I wandered down this path for years.
As I grew older, this sunny garden path, bursting with life and energy for my future, has changed. At points, it no longer went straight ahead. There were often many forks and turns that I had to choose. Some of them went narrower and narrower, growing uglier or darker, until I got to a better pathway. Some of them seemed hopeful, seemed pretty, seemed full of life as I walked along it... But I would go further down it, and see nothing but darkness, the flowers dead, and no possible way to go back to where I used to be.

Life is full of these metaphoric pathways.

As I've gone along these paths, the flowers have been fading away, slowly. The sun is going behind the clouds. And at this point, I find I'm stood at a point in the pathway that looks hopelessly narrowed-down and enclosed. This path has been made for me, but not the way that I myself would have made it. The other side of it is shrouded by thick, heavy clouds. That is my future. It doesn't look full of promise, but I have no choice but to walk through it until I reach the end.

I have never been able to just 'go back' up the pathway, back to the little sunny one I was so happily accustomed to. I have had to choose, and make my decisions, and just keep going forward. Never backwards. Because we have no choice, do we ?

We choose, we follow, we keep walking forward. Because we have to.

What about you ? Do you see the end of your pathway ? Can you look straight down it and see sunny days, full of promise ?
Or can you sympathise with me; do you see what I see down my path ?

Either way, I don't know yet what my future holds. I can't see which way it is going to take me, whether it goes straight ahead or whether they will be many more forks and turns. Hence why I'm walking straight into it 'eyes wide closed'.

It scares me. But I have to keep walking it.
Because that's how life goes. And it's the same for you as it is for me.
Whether we like it or not !..