A three year old boy lay sprawled out on a carpet, watching the ceiling fan in the hot room go round and round and round. He wondered, “Is this what life is?” And he ignored it, deciding it couldn’t be.

As the boy grew older, he found himself in a kindergarten class. He looked down at his fingers, slopped with blue and red finger paint. On his tiny desk, he gazed at his picture that he had created while pondering what life actually was. It seemed to be a sort of fire. Maybe a bush. He now remembered back to his Sunday School class when his elderly teacher spoke of a burning bush that could talk. He looked at the fiery image. “Is that what life is?” Deciding it was not, he swiped the paper from his desk and stared back off into space.

The boy lived the next few years in unrest, reading all he could about life. But his grade school library was inefficient, and mostly offered books with pictures in them that had already been vandalized by the kids. He came to the age of eight, and was learning how to write in a different style of letter. The teacher said it would make their writing more “grown-up.” He stared down at the swirly letters and flowing writing and wondered, “Is this what life is?” He decided it was not, and stared off once more as the teacher instructed how to make a cursive “T.”

He entered middle school a few years later, and a new library was now at his disposal. He searched and searched for some answer to his question, but he mostly found books filled with stories of heroic deeds and people who lived happily ever after. He looked around at the other kids in the library, who were only there because they had to spend a half hour before school ended in it twice a week, as part of the school’s curriculum. He looked at the other children and saw how happy they were to joke around with each other, while he stood alone searching. He wondered, “Is that what life is?” Deciding it seemed too simple, he turned away to look even more.

Not long after, the boy was a teenager and was in High School. He spent a lot of his free time reading, wondering, thinking. He even convinced the principal to give him a block in the library to assist the elderly librarian, even though it was considered a senior ‘filler’ block. He spent his time searching and studying, doing very well in school. But as he studied, he began to look around him. He studied his colleagues. He noted how they were always surrounded by friends, laughing and goofing off. He thought to himself, “Could life be that simple?” He decided that many minds greater than his had searched their whole lives for an answer to what life is, and he couldn’t have just found it at age fifteen.