I always say it’s experience that makes you older, not how long you’ve been alive.

I've learned so much about who I really am, where I want to go in life, and how I want to go about living life.

Thinking ahead is never a bad thing, it turns bad once you start letting what hasn’t happened yet dictate what you do now. That can be in relationships or with jobs. It’s important to think realistically but never too harshly. Being realistic about what you want or what direction you want to go in is important but it’s just as important to step back for a few seconds to think about the possible outcomes.

Ever since I was young, I’ve been infatuated with the future. I always wondered, when would my parents die? How soon would the world end? What’s for dinner tomorrow?

As I got older, I realized that sometimes being realistic and thinking ahead can hurt not only yourself but others as well. I was dating someone in high school and he invited me to go to prom with him. I knew he was going away to school and we’d be in a long distance relationship and thought a lot about what that meant for us and how that would affect us in the future. I thought that staying with my partner after he left for college wasn’t worth it anymore. He’d move away and probably find someone else at school while I was still in high school.

We broke up. I was convinced that it would be a waste of time and there would be no point so I ended things for my sake but mostly his. In a way, I felt like I was more prepared for him leaving than he was, but it was only because I had spent so much time overthinking the scenario.

I created a future that didn’t involve me even though I had no idea how our relationship would play out. I didn’t even give it a chance and once I let that chance go, there was no turning back.

Now that I’m in my last year of college, years after that break-up, and I've realized how dumb that was for me to do. Not breaking up with him, but rather letting my obsession with the future take control of what was happening at that moment. I taught me a valuable lesson about over-thinking and over-worrying.

There’s nothing wrong with a little worrying, but there is a point when you need to step back and think about what you’re doing.

I’m currently dating someone now but with graduation facing me straight in the face, it has me thinking about my future with my significant other. He’s a year younger than me and I know that our paths are soon heading in different directions and it pains me to think about not having him in my life once I graduate.

It’s not something I enjoy thinking about but I can’t help it because I know things will change after I graduate. I’ll be back home and he’ll still be in school. There are so many things I want to do after I graduate like go to Ecuador to teach English but doing that would be being away from him for a much longer period of time.

I wonder if maybe it would be better to give it all up now to save myself the pain later on, but at this point, I’ve put too much emotional investment in him and my relationship to simply toss it out like my younger self would have.

I’m not sure what will happen after to us after I graduate but I’ve come to terms with the unknown. I had an epiphany: being caught up in the future I created in my head was taking away from the time I had with him now. There’s no point in thinking about it, whatever happens, will happen, and I can’t do anything about it. What I can do is immerse myself in the now and live like there’s only now because there's only one thing we can be certain about, and that's right now.

I want to stay happy! Of course I have moments where I think about the future, but I pause for a moment and realize that he hasn’t even left yet. He’s still within reach and we still have each other and that’s more important than wasting time thinking about not being with him. It causes unnecessary pain.

We like to think we can always handle every situation but it’s truly impossible to prepare yourself for the unknown. What we can do is learn to live for now without fearing the future. You can be cautious and prepared for what you think will happen but we’ll never know for certain where things will go. It’s better to accept the uncertainty and be happy that there is no certainty.

As Forest Gump would say, “Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”