I sat beside the small campfire, feeding it twigs of spruce and balsam—little dead, light-deprived branches I’d gathered from the lower trunks of nearby conifers. This is always the best and easiest place in the forest to find dry wood, no matter the weather. It’s a small secret that has been known for millennia by indigenous peoples and those who live close to the land, who have needed to quickly gather firewood and tinder. I had countless times sent canoe-campers out to forage for such supplies of an evening, in many a wilderness camp. And if they did not already know the secret, they were inevitably delighted to learn this small tidbit of woods-lore.

The little fire crackled merrily. The water along the shoreline whispered, wavelets lapping, occasionally chuckling in some tiny cleft or hollow at the water’s edge. Overhead, the Big Dipper poured its invisible contents over the spruce-steepled landscape below, and into the lake, and onto all the thousands of square miles of wilderness surrounding me, and over the cities and towns and strongholds of civilization far beyond. As it always had. For anyone who ever sat by a small campfire far below and noticed.

The forest was dark around me. There was no moon. The black silhouettes of trees stood framed only in the soft light of the stars. Other constellations were there as well, high above the trees. Draco, the dragon. The Corona Borealis. Cassiopeia. The ‘summer triangle’ composed of Deneb—the bright light in Cygnus the Swan’s tail—and Vega in the upper right corner of Lyra the stringed lyre, and Altair borne on the outstretched wings of Aquila the Eagle. These were old friends familiar from many a wilderness night under the stars, although of course these feelings of friendship and affection flowed only in one direction. Probably.

By the light of the fire, I could almost see those many generations of wood-gatherers who had come before and sat around similar fires. The Abenaki, the Anishinabe, the Menominee, the Cheyenne, the Lakota, the hundreds of other native tribes and nations of North America; the frontiersmen-and-women, the voyageurs, the trappers and traders, the immigrants and homesteaders and farmers and pioneers, the loggers and the prospectors and the railroad laborers and all who had struggled to open up a continent, simultaneously struggling to glean a meager living and to simply survive. I could see a wider swath of humanity as well, individuals of differing skin tones and statures and facial appearances, squatting on their haunches beside a small and flickering source of warmth and security, even as mile-high ice fields covered the earth and chilled the air. And I could see familiar figures from the more recent past, too, old friends and family members, gathered around campfires that were strung like beads of light decades into the past, along lakes and rivers now hazy in the mists of recollection.

But I sat there alone. And fed twigs into the fire. Beneath the Big Dipper. I watched small sparks rise toward the tree-tops, toward the stars, then lose their brief glow and fade into the night. I thought about the little sparks we call life. About all those generations of human beings, and other beings, all that they had fought to overcome, to last just a little while under the stars. I wondered, as I often had before, about happiness, and purpose, and meaning. I thought about an article I had recently read about the extinction of virtually all life on earth with the impact of a city-sized asteroid some 66 million years ago on the Yucatan peninsula, leaving only a few of the smallest, burrowing, shrew-sized mammals surviving, beings from whom we eventually descended. Such a catastrophic collision would surely occur again, someday, and there is no saying when. One has only to understand something of mathematical odds, or gaze upon the many craters of the moon, to know it. I thought of what that meant to our many confident philosophies and religions, to history and to art and literature, to our human dreams of legacy, of something, somehow, permanent and lasting, here on our tiny, planetary lifeboat adrift on the seas of time and space. I remembered a line I had once read, about the pages of Shakespeare someday blowing across a dead and empty plain.

I thought about other uncomfortable parameters of our earthly existence—the fact that at any given moment billions of creatures the world over are suffering and dying, many of them being eaten alive. And I thought about the countless human-inflicted agonies in this world—cruelty and carelessness and ignorance and torture and abuse and war. Things that are far more endemic to human life than we often care to ponder.

Such dark thoughts sometimes come in the night. They come, perhaps, when we are alone under the stars. When distractions are gone and the black forms of trees loom in silent vigil. And yet, on this night, beside my little, crackling fire, another, unexpected thought occurred as well. The curious idea that still, in the midst of this sometimes brutal, always difficult, always threatened, and always terminal existence, we human beings do something strange.

We enjoy life.

Perhaps, much of the time. In the midst of manifest meaninglessness, we seek meaning. Persistently. And often find it. In truth, it is in no way strange or anomalous that we are sometimes depressed. Or anxious. Or wracked with feelings of dread or hopelessness. No. Those would seem in the face of all evidence and circumstance to be perfectly appropriate responses to this earthly existence.

The real question is, why are we not always so? All of us. All the time.

Other questions then follow. How is it that we have humor—the ability to laugh and to feel buoyance, silliness, even giddiness? Why empathy? Why tenderness? Grace? How is it that human beings are endowed with this odd capacity to experience true enjoyment—the sensations of satisfaction and comfort, well-being, delight, even bliss—when listening to a piece of music, when smelling a flower, when viewing a sunrise, when holding a child? Why should this be when, with our large brains and active imaginations, we know early on exactly what the future holds? As Hemingway wrote, “All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.” One hundred percent of the time. Always. For everyone. Not only for ourselves, but for all of the people and other creatures we will ever know. And not merely death. Along the way, and almost certainly at the end, there is also suffering. And great loss.

That is what we call, life—the plain and true nature of it. And no one is ‘wrong,’ or ill, or ‘out of their minds,’ to see it that way.

And yet… tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions of our fellow travelers on this ‘mortal coil,’ on this lovely blue marble—the merest speck of dust in the cosmos—do not curl into helpless balls of anxiety and perish in despair. Why not? Why is it that we retain this strange ability to enjoy life, and how do we continue the elusive search for meaning?

I looked at the dark trees around me. Each one of them a picture, a portrait of the act of reaching, reaching for the sun. It’s the way trees are made, the way they live. The human mind reaches, too, toward growth, toward fulfillment, toward harmony and beauty, toward that something we call meaning. This seems to be the way that we are made. It is well worth noting, I thought, that there really is a sun that trees reach for—that they do not climb toward some imaginary goal that is not there. And in our own growth and reaching, likely we don’t either. It would indeed be a strange way to be made—an odd way for evolution to progress—to reach for things that are not there.

I got up from the fire, felt in a corner of the Duluth pack, and pulled out a small packet of tea—my favorite, jasmine tea, infused with the impossibly sweet fragrance of jasmine blossoms. I poured some hot water over the tea bag and caught the aroma. After a minute I took a sip. It was, as always, delightful. I closed my eyes and breathed in the fragrance. I thought of a short passage from the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, in which he explained the simple idea that tea, in order to be enjoyed, must always be sipped in the present. That one must be present, in the moment, discarding ruminations about the past or worries about the future, in order to enjoy it. “Only in the present,” said Hanh, “can you savor the aroma, taste the sweetness, appreciate the delicacy.” Without that awareness, that presence in the moment, you will soon look down at the cup, and the tea will simply be gone. Life is a lot like that cup of tea, said Hanh.

How is it that human beings, in a world that often seems defined by struggle and loss, can yet be happy? Can enjoy life? Maybe it has to do with the very fact that we are indeed small and humble beings in a trackless universe. That despite all our ambition and mental capacity, our ability—and our need—to explore and comprehend that vast and implacable cosmos and our existence within it, we are yet able—and are meant—to live as creatures of small and personal needs and prospects as well. Physical, mental, spiritual needs that, when fulfilled from time to time in simple ways, can bring us happiness and satisfaction, and enjoyment.

I took another sip of tea, still fragrant, but beginning to grow cool in the night air. The fire was dying low. I tossed on a few more twigs and it flared to life. Standing up, I shuffled out of the campfire’s small circle of light and down to the water’s edge. I gazed down the dark shores of the lake and heard the yodeling of a distant loon. The wavelets still chuckled softly among the rocks. With a slight shift in the breeze, I could make out the barest, whispering undertone of a small rapid at the north end of the lake. Tomorrow I would nose the canoe over the lip and run it. I’d slip past the boulders and the sweepers and the souse holes and the standing waves, and would safely reach still waters. I had done it many times before.

It was a beautiful evening. Tomorrow would be a good day, a day to simply be alive. A day to enjoy. I cast one last glance down the long, dark shore, then turned and walked back into the circle of light.