Yesterday, after a brutally long day, I drove through Wendy’s for a side salad. I monotonously placed my order, waited somewhat impatiently in line, and when I arrived at the carry-out window, my whole mood got a makeover. The workers who were making my salad were taking bets on what kind of dressing I wanted, and their manager was literally cheering when I told him he’d guessed my preference correctly. As I drove off, he called out the window, “Have a fun one!”

Incredibly, I went through the rest of my night with a skip in my step and a smile on my face. The people on that one shift at Wendy’s had transferred to me their infectious joy, and I’d picked up on it and spread it to the rest of my loved ones. It often amazes me how the simple things in life can really make a difference in the way we choose to live. Above my kitchen sink, my mother hangs a small wooden sign that reads, “Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.”

I try to live in-the-moment, but to be honest, my mind is almost always elsewhere. I worry about literally anything you could worry about – things that have happened in the past, things that have yet to happen, but are looming over my future like a dark storm cloud. And it frustrates me beyond compare, because I am choosing to waste the time I have now focusing on things that are not affecting me in that moment.

Sometimes, I think it takes a wakeup call to put things into perspective. Recently, my youngest uncle died suddenly at the age of 41. I had just seen him at my cousin’s birthday party two weeks prior, and when I hugged him goodbye, I didn’t realize that that would be the last hug goodbye I would ever have the opportunity to give him. When I received the news that he was gone, I started to wonder things about him that I had never asked. What else did he want to do with his life? What dreams had never come to fruition? How many times had he told himself, “It doesn’t matter if I don’t reach my goals today, I still have years of my life to get to them”?

Tomorrow is never guaranteed. So now, I want to share with you the knowledge that today is a gift, one that you are given for the briefest of moments, and then in a flash, it’s gone. So don’t waste it. Have a fun one! Do something spontaneous, act crazy, listen to Christmas music in June just because you can, have one of those chocolate frosted donuts your mom bought that you’ve been avoiding for ‘caloric’ reasons. Go to bed each night and ask yourself the question, “If I died tomorrow, would this have been the way I’d spend my last day?” If the answer to that question is no, then change it. My mother and I attended a showing of Matilda: The Musical in Pittsburgh last Saturday, and one of the lines in the show has stuck with me ever since. Constantly talked down to and told she can’t change her world, Matilda burst into song, telling anyone who would listen, “If it’s not right, you have to put it right. But nobody else is going to put it right for me, nobody but me is going to change my story.”

You are more powerful than you believe you are. Have you ever done something just for the sake of doing it? Have you ever spontaneously gone off on an adventure just because you could? And I’m not talking about taking the next plane to New Zealand and plummeting rapidly to the earth in a faster-than-the-speed-of-light skydive. I’m talking about treating each individual minute of your life like its own adventure. You are the main character of your life book, and when you flick through the war-torn pages of each chapter, you should be smiling and crying and shaking your head and reminiscing about every which way you failed and succeeded.

So now, I extend the challenge to each of you. If you don’t like the way you’re living, you are the only one who is going to be able to change that. The desire to reach true happiness is the one thing that we, as human beings, have in common besides death. We are all on individual journeys to achieve a perpetual state of contentment. For too many, that journey ends prematurely, and they might have endured a litany of grievances for the whole of their lives without ever experiencing true joy. I beg you, do not let that be you. In a nutshell, live by the philosophy that it does not matter what other people think of you, there is nothing wrong with pursuing your passion as long as yourself and others are not hurt in the process, there is nothing wrong with being quirky, or nerdy, or whatever else you identify as because you are the best you there is, and I wouldn’t change you for the world. Happiness cannot be handed to you, it must come from you, and it can easily be born from something as simple and pure as the sun rising.

I will leave you, now, with these words to reflect upon: “Happiness is morning and evening, daytime and nighttime, too. For happiness is anyone and anything at all that’s loved by you.” – You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.