Last weekend, I packed up my dorm room. I tossed out the half-eaten box of Honey Nut Cheerios and collected the “good luck” sticky notes on my bulletin board. I tore the pictures down from the walls and was sure to save the name tags on our door. In three hours, a year of my life was stuffed away into plastic boxes and loaded into the back of an SUV. Sophomore year was over. Two years of college, done.
In two more years, I have to leave my network of support to start my own life. It’s a little exciting, but mostly terrifying. I began to have a “mid-(college)-life crisis.” I want enough time to do everything. I want to take every course in the catalog (except maybe Quantum Mechanics), I want to do my own research, I want to get an internship, I want to go abroad, I want to join that club and volunteer with that group.
Of course, I realize that we are young. We are only 20-something years old. We have time to do anything we want, just not all at once. We have time to fail and to start again. College is only the beginning. We can still change our minds.
While we should never lose this sense of possibility, we must also never lose our sense of urgency. As college becomes familiar — the dorm room becomes our home, the friends become our family — we become complacent. Time begins to move slowly yet passes quickly. Each day becomes routine, and we lose sight of the incredible opportunities in front of us. I fell into this trap. I started to say “no” to joining new clubs because “I will have time down the road,” and I failed to register for that interesting class because “there will always be another semester.”
When we become comfortable, we say “no” to new things — that’s what leads to regret. The “would have," “should have," “could have” — the “if only…then maybe.”
We’ve all been told that college will be the best four years of our lives. For the sake of being optimistic, I hope not. I want to have fun when I am 30, laugh when I am 40 and travel when I’m 50. However, there is something unique about college. It’s perhaps the only time in our lives when even the most ordinary moments are memorable.
Our lives are just a collection of these moments. The trouble is that we don’t recognize the value of them as they happen; we can only appreciate them in retrospect. When I look back on my college years, I hope that I will smile and know the memories of those years will always be a part of me. That those were some of the best years of my life. That I took advantage of every opportunity. That even the ordinary moments were meaningful.
As I pulled away from campus, I scrolled through my camera roll. The past year lay before me in 1,009 photos. The spring break trip, the formals, the date parties, the birthdays. The goat, the dodge-ball tournament, the banana pancakes, the Wa-Wa mac n’ cheese. That night, that day, that moment. And I smiled.
