The Simple Steps of Life

This past summer, I was able to gain many new experiences. I learned new things, made new friends, discovered new ideas. However I was able to do two of my favorite activities : eat and sleep. With all of my free time, those two activities were sometimes all that I would do in a day. After spending three months in my home, I discovered a very basic truth that I had never thought of before. I discovered that if we take out all of the things that we do in daily routine that do not reflect basic human instinct, that all we truly need to know are the steps: eat, sleep, repeat.

When my new theory was discussed with my family, they did not seem to understand. I said that when broken down, eating and sleeping is all that I really need to do in life to survive. They told me that I was just being lazy and needed less free time. For some reason, they could not see these ideas the way I could. Now both sides were confused. They could not understand my logic just as I could not understand theirs.

I believe eating and sleeping are more important than people realize. Every day, I hear "Oh man, I didn't get to bed until 2:00 last night" or "I wish I had some breakfast this morning, I'm starving". I find this to be especially true in teenagers. Many of them are so focused on schoolwork that they forget about their own basic needs. Perhaps the schools should be responsible for helping with this dilemma. I believe that schools should provide free continental breakfast for students who have to get to school before ten o'clock. I believe that nap time should be assigned as a class that students can take after lunch. At least, schools should start later than 8:00 s othat teenagers who need more time to eat and sleep can.

I feel like another group that does not understand this logic is Hollywood. I cannot recall a film that hass been made that shows a person lying in bed asleep, nor eating an entire meal without panning into another scene. Some people may find that boring, but I say that having characters in movies sleeping and eating would give them some sense of realism. Not all humans try to pull off bank heists or win the Olympics, but every single human on this planet eats and sleeps.

When I reflect on it, this seems to truly be all that we need. I've looked at all the instincts that humans are born with, and realized that there are not many. Humans are not born with the ability to speak a language. We are not born knowing how to walk. We do not know how to love or hate. But we do know something. We know how to chew and swallow, and we know how to fall asleep. I realize now that if we took away everything that we have in life (school, a job, friends, family, technology), we would need to fall back on our instincts which leave us knowing how to do only two things: eat and sleep.

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