Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It is like wearing glasses after years of blurry vision. It is the perfect tool for comprehending a situation in its entirety and realizing how your actions could have better rewarded you. I find myself now in my early 20s wishing that I knew the things I know now when I was sixteen. But perhaps that would alter where I am now.

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received was – "we live in a world where we have the luxury to live at our own pace. You are not in competition with anyone."

Competition. A word that has been around me since before I can even remember. Since we are babies, we follow a scale that we get everything within a certain timeframe. Granted that some of these stages are necessary for determining milestones in our development, but are stages and timelines always required? Flash forward to high school, we are assessed by where we land on the class rank; being defined by how well we score in each subject and the people who we can friends are now our competitors.

We are surrounded by competition, and for some us, it has become second nature.

It is embedded in our culture to compare our results with one another, forcing us into the vicious cycle of competition. Now, I'm not saying that competition is a bad thing; in fact, I would consider myself to thrive on it. But has our society taken this concept to a whole new level? It seems as though we do not know how to live without the fear of constant comparison with one another.

In my own example, during my high school senior year, I was so fixated on attending university. I refused to take a year out (commonly known as a 'gap year') because of this concept of competition. If I took a year out, I wouldn't graduate by 22. I wouldn't do the things I'm supposed to do at 18. My freshman experience would be ruined. These are all thoughts that I pondered. I wanted to take a year out for myself. To breathe. To relax. To do things for myself. To find myself. This does not make you a failure. Nor does it make you inferior or lack drive.

I wish I had listened to my gut feeling when I was 18 years old. My heart was telling me to defer for a year and travel and attend university a year later. But the thought of competition ate at me, so much so that my brain convinced my heart to do something I wasn't 100% comfortable with.

So alas, when my acceptance came from Temple University, I was thrilled to accept it. I fell in love with the campus and the people, and for the first time in a long while, I felt as though I belonged.

Here is the second-best piece of advice I have ever been given – "there is a time for everything and everything takes time."

I knew almost immediately that Temple was the school for me, but low and behold, just like my heart had once told me, it was not my time and I knew that I needed the break for my own sanity and promised myself that I would return a year later. So, that's exactly what I did. I saw my advisor and booked my Leave of Absence for the following academic year. And let me tell you, it was the best year of my life thus far.

Hindsight taught me that perhaps it would have been better to take a gap year fresh out of high school. Maybe this would have been better timing and given me more consistency in my education, but then I remember that I would not have met the amazing human beings I now call some of my best friends or had the most incredible experiences (paragliding over the Himalayas being at the top of that list.)

We are always hurrying through life, but be wary that we are not on this planet for long, so try to be a sponge and soak up every experience. Do not let this whirlwind we call 'life' dictate where you want to go.