As we come to the close of a year (between thanksgiving and Christmas) when we all reflect on the good and bad times that we’ve had as high schoolers, we should take some time to stop and remember the sights and memories we’ve collected throughout the year.

Let’s set the scene: It’s two a.m., and you’ve been doing homework since ten o’clock. (Or, the second you got home from practice/rehearsal for that thing you really love but can’t take a class for during school). You may or may not be done with homework, but you’re going to bed right now before you start acting like a zombie. You figure, “Why not get some fresh air before I go to bed?” and pull the door open ever so slowly (so the whole house doesn’t wake up) and peek outside. Here, you stop. The sky has you breathless.

The moon is as big as you’ve ever seen it. It’s shining so brightly that it hurts your eyes. The stars have a clarity that the light pollution seldom allows them to. The grass on your front lawn has an almost cartoonish amount of frost on it. The leaves freshly fallen from their trees are lit up by the ghostly glow of the moon. You pause to wonder, “Where’s my camera?” But this perfect moment won’t stick around long enough for you to get the iPhone out of your pocket.

There are plenty of other mind-blowing sights to be found in daily (and nightly) life. We, being Utahns, are likely to have all taken a long, leisurely hike in the mountains at one point or another.  Sometimes you even bother to look back on the path you’ve just taken. You turn to find one of those sights that makes all thoughts of anything but mountain meadows and cute little hiking paths leave your head.  These are the moments that some of us live for.

The list isn’t hard to add to: downtown Salt Lake City at Christmas, the view from the top of any hike you can possibly go on in Zion Canyon, seeing a lit-up Christmas tree in a dark house, looking across the cement outside of Bingham the day after chalk-the-walk, walking out your front door in the morning and seeing that it snowed for the first time of the year, looking down a jam-packed table at Thanksgiving. These are some of those perfect moments that the sight is so much more than a picture could ever show.

We spend all year collecting moments. Finding sights that you don’t just see every day. They have to be delicately brought out by the magic of a moment; magic that a camera could never hope to capture. And we should all stop and appreciate how great the sights that we have are. We all get only a few really great moments each year that you could call picture-perfect, but a picture could never say enough.