Time is such a crazy thing. If you really slow down and think about time as an idea, it is absolutely crazy how millions of seconds make up these days and weeks of your life. You just have this one life, though, and sometimes that is impossible to comprehend until you realize as you’re packing up your dorm room that you’re about to be a sophomore in college. We all live so focused on one day that we seem to forget that so many are passing by without our realization. You blink when you’re 7 years old and you are baking cookies for Santa, and when you open your eyes again, you are drowning in homework at the library at 4 a.m. wondering why you ever left home in the first place.
When we do grow up, many of us will be lucky to live to 80. Eighty years old. That means that as 20-year-olds, a quarter of our life is already gone, millions of seconds spent studying, sleeping, loving, and laughing. We lived each second believing there would be millions more without noticing that so many had already passed. But it was just time. Time that we can’t get back now. This isn’t meant to be melancholy or sad, it is meant to be inspiring. This is meant to be inspiring for everyone who seems to be losing time faster than they can spend it.
This past Saturday, I watched a couple of soon-to-be graduating seniors cry at the thought of leaving Chapel Hill. The first thought that came to my mind was: “I have three more years!” And then I stopped to think just how quickly this past year flew by. After I thought about that for a second, I suddenly had a sickening feeling in my stomach as I wished more than anything that everything around me would just slow down. But, it can’t. I wish that I could go back to the first day of school and do it all over again. I want to relive every Saturday night and every graded paper that I busted my a** to get a B-plus on. This world, our lives, they don’t slow down for anyone -- and sometimes it even feels as if life speeds up on purpose just to tease us.
So, instead of wasting more time dwelling over the time I have left or the time I already wasted, I am determined to focus on spending all the time I do have on enjoying every aspect of the world around me. The love, the happiness, the hurt, the tears, the confusion, the change. All of these aspects, good or bad, take up time that is invaluable and should, therefore, be appreciated for exactly what these moments of happiness and confusion are: time.
