The lights were dim, my lemon poppy seed muffin warm, a man and a woman were singing “Lost In My Mind” by The Head and The Hearts, and genuine happiness was radiating off of me. There we were sitting in the back room of Heritage House with hushed voices surrounding us, so, if you listened closely, you could hear the man playing his guitar in the other room. My twin, Zoey, and I had been laying on her living room floor an hour earlier, trying to decide what to do when we decided to go to one of our favorite places at school. This was a place full of many Saturday morning memories where we sat drinking our iced coffees, me eating a warmed lemon poppy seed muffin, talking about our lives; the past, the present, and the future. The details of those conversations have now blurred together but I always look back on them with a slight grin, thinking that our lives were simpler then. However, there we were, sitting in the same quaint café, having the same conversations, a year later, and I thought to myself, how long before I forget the details of this moment too.

I believed those moments of genuine happiness to be rare, and I didn’t want to lose a single minute of it. So, for the first time in a long time, I jotted down everything about it, from the taste of the muffin to the sound of the music and to what that fleeting moment of happiness truly felt like to the best of my ability. I sat there for a while and decided to write down more memories of the times in my life where I was simply happy. This led me to recall 5 a.m. car rides with my friends chasing the sunrise, jam sessions to songs we listened to in middle school before the bell rang, the taste of every flavor of Slurpee all mixed in one and the wind in my hair as we drove The Loop with the windows down, and those days spent throwing the football or kicking the soccer ball around with my little brother before our parents called us in for dinner. My pen hit the paper and the details came flooding back, letting me relive those moments. I thought to myself, why did those memories only become important to me when they had already passed? Why did I not take a step back, look up, and appreciate what I had?

At the age of twelve, you just want to be thirteen so you can be a teen. Then you just want to be in high school because middle school was overrated. Then you just want to be in college already because of all the drama in high school. And then you’re in college and you want the next thing and the next thing after that, until you're older and telling yourself that if you just could go back, you could finally be happy. We as a society, are always wanting more, twisting the American Dream to fit our reality, only to be left unsatisfied due to thinking that our lives were never enough. This realization hit me and I started to think about all those times I had complained that only if I had this or that, I would be fine. The truth was, I was fine, I had always been fine, and by constantly wanting more, I had not been fine. With that knowledge in mind, I decided to take a moment and do something for myself. I decided to be enthusiastic about my passions because for such a long time I had ignored them. I pet every dog I see, I laugh when I find something funny, I say something when I don’t, I chose to go on hikes instead of going to parties, but most importantly, I smile at everyone and everything. No matter where I go or what I’m doing, I take a moment to breathe in, look around, and breathe out. I don’t want to be on my death bed telling myself that those were my golden days and be kicking myself for not realizing it then and there. There’s a quote that says,

“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living, breathing, screaming invitation to believe in better things”. – Jamie Tworkowski

I became enthusiastic about life and little by little, day by day, the things that brought me down or that simply just didn’t matter, slowly went away. By taking in my moments of happiness and being present in my now, I became the person I wanted to be; caring, driven, passionate, and most of all, happy. So, take the time out of your day and take a step back. Look up. Breathe in. Breathe out. For these are your golden days. Take note of your happiness for it has always been yours. And be that living, breathing, screaming invitation to believe in better things.