In all of his excellence and brilliance, Ferris Bueller once gave some of the best advice every college student needs, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Ferris articulated the truth behind just taking a break from life every now and then. As college students, our lives evolve around how much we can fit into our schedules. We have class, meals, working out, showering, homework, studying, work and then social life, leaving us at 2 a.m. only to get up five hours later to repeat, five days a week. We frequently put so much on our plates that we forget to take time for ourselves to relax and look around. 

Summer is the time to take a few days, or weeks, to recuperate. Unfortunately, most of us just jump right back into packing our days with work, internships, personal health, and catching up with old friends. Every day is just as busy as it would be as if we were back at school. This became a habit for me ever since high school sports took over three-fourths of my summer, and the rest was spent on family vacation. What we all really need is to take a day to play hooky from life and from all of the superficial drama that surrounds us -- to be crazy, fun, and wild, and even end up on a float in the middle of Chicago or a Los Angeles parade (it's on my bucket list).

I, like many other of my peers, am notorious for not giving myself the time necessary to recover and rest so that my body and mind can reach its potential on the daily. There is only enough time in the day to spend doing things we love, which can be broken down into three categories: social life, school and grades, and sleep. It's cliché, but true, that choosing between two of the three is likely to happen, and to balance all three is nearly impossible.  

Take a break. Go shopping (aka retail therapy). Go read a book (something Nicholas Sparks). Sleep for hours. Eat amazing food (sushi or Thai). Get a massage or a mani-pedi (guys, too). Instead of staying up extra late for a Netflix episode you can watch when you actually have time, spend it enriching your life for a better tomorrow. 

With these last few weeks of summer, it is essential for our sanity to take a day or two or three to just be; to not do anything and just be happy before our lives become chaotic again with class. Take these days to remember how blessed and special our lives are. Life goes by at million miles per second, and as Ferris reminds us in the simplest of words, if we don’t take the time to appreciate our lives and what is around us, we miss the best things. Let’s not forget that life is unique gift, and there is so much to live for, so “stop and look around once in a while.”