The Saturday night campfire died down revealing peaceful darkness. I laid on my back in the damp grass that was slowly collecting summer night dew. The cloudless sky revealed a nacreous moon. How can we be so knowledgeable, I thought, yet so naive to the great world around us? What put us on this earth out of the whole universe, but more importantly, why are we here?

We are here to see the morning sun peak over the trees on the horizon and allow its vibrant rays to encase us, to make us feel whole, just once. We must feel a cool evening breeze that places goosebumps on our arms and legs blowing across a marshy pond and smell the sweet freshness of nature.

We are here for the backyard whiffle ball home run through the neighbor's open window. For the slide into second and the arguing, that follows. That ten minutes where everyone hates each other due to a simple disagreement until someone calls redo and they all rejoice and pretend like nothing ever happened.

We are here for the string of waves, and then the crash, and then a line of white foam that stretches down the coast as far as the eye can see.  For the cheerful laughter as a wave comes in faster than anticipated and grabs sets of frantic feet in it’s reaching fingers as it crawls up the shore.

We are here for the fourth quarter fumble and pig pile that keeps the football hidden for seven and a half minutes. For the final second hale marry that touches down in the endzone as you close your eyes because you just can’t watch.

We are here for the rage of a 79% on a middle school math test that ends in a suspension. The blindness as to what the real world brings and when it even starts. For the realization that colleges don’t care what the hell you did in middle school or about those extra homework sheets, you took to try to get ahead back then.

We are here for a change. Our jobs as a human being to shape the world in one way or another, to leave our mark. It is our job to edit, re-word, and add to the shared document that is our world. We must examine it’s many pages, looking at the intricate words that lay on the page. Some are scribbled like a last-minute signature on some forgotten paperwork. Some are typed with master accuracy and a perfected font. Some are just there.

We are here for the simple things in life, the time you have with family, the holidays that repeat themselves every year. The same faces walk through the same door on the same day, it’s like a broken record that is trying with all it’s might to keep spinning, yet we love it. We love every bit of it, from the happiness that seems to fly through the air to the laughs that ring out of the living room to the presents under the tree to the turkey on the table. No one looks any deeper, and that how we like it. No one cares about anything more than who’s bringing dessert and what color the Christmas lights should be. We don’t stress the little things and we handle the big ones. We do our best to live by that, but for the other 50% of the time, we just lay peacefully in the grass, enjoying the serenity over the environment, looking at the stars and talking about why we are here.