Sometimes, people can become familiar with the motions. Wake up, get ready, go to school. Go home, eat, sleep.

Repeat.

Nobody thinks about the future, notices the little things. How beautiful the sky is today, the dew on the grass, even the smell of fallen leaves in November.

The happy feeling you get on a summer day when you’re finally free.

But then we sit. And we watch television. And we eat. And we sleep.

Repeat.

Go outside, and see the world! It’s approaching fast, so many things to be discovered. You are looking at it in black and white but if you just opened your eyes...you’d see the beautiful colors. Everything will hit you, and then you realize: You could die tomorrow. Or the next day. You could never see the sky again, or the grass. You’ll never feel the way a raindrop hits your tongue, the faint taste of salt and foreshadowing of a downpour to come.

We could never see our friends again.

You know, we see people. We see them at the grocery store at the gas station, or at a movie theatre. And we walk by. We never stop to say hello.

Because people are a casualty. We see them every day.

But you can’t see people when you die. Not the way we do now.

We could know so many names. So many things, and thoughts. Smells and tastes, gatherings of a life well lived.

Or we could remember the outlines of a television screen and a potato chip bag in our laps. The necessities of the human are, oddly enough, potato chips, and television. Or, that’s the way it is in America, anyways. How odd. How sad. We say we need to “relax”, but our days consist of using a car (a thing we invented so we could drive our lazy selves wherever we want with no effort while causing pollution simultaneously) to go wherever we wish; sitting at a desk typing (So we don’t have to actually write something out); going home in a car again; sitting at a TV with our beloved potato chips clutched desperately in our hands.

And we wonder why America is the fattest country.

“I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly...If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he’d say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows…”

-Clarisse McClellan, Fahrenheit 451

When we drive by in cars, we don’t go slow enough to see the world, what we’ve been given freely. Have you ever walked for miles and miles and just looked at the world? Can’t say I have, but I want to. Wouldn’t your mind expand? Get bigger, better? Know the world, not some equation trying to figure it out, because the world isn’t something you can predict. It is something perfect and unique and beautiful. No equation could describe it, so why not get to know what we can, while we can?

I’m growing grass from seeds in my backyard. Watching the grass grow can actually be amazing. I saw the first sprouts and fell in love with how something that small and green could cling to life and live on sun and water. Soon many sprouts came, and grew. Half of my yard is growing grass now, and I’m working on the other half, but feeling the life of something new and green, without a glass screen and fake people on it, gave me hope.

That this world isn’t something broken, and trashed, but something to be discovered and felt and… lived.