When time begins to come to an end, you don’t want to be left thinking about the things that were never done.

Do you ever stop to take time and examine yourself? I’m not talking about stopping and staring at the mirror after you brush your teeth in the morning. I’m not talking about scrolling through an album of pictures on you phone and looking at yourself after taking over a hundred selfies and then some. Have you ever just paused and examined how you’re doing in “the life column”?

If you, the reader, are anything like me, you would most likely pass yourself in many categories, agreeing that you’re doing and living life pretty well. Although you like how you’re doing at the moment -- you’re doing well in all our classes, you have strong and healthy relationships with friends, *insert anything else you have down pat* -- it still seems that you’re missing something and failing in life.

Many times, when life gets to become too much of a routine, you find yourself caught going through the motions. Instead of waking up and being thankful for another day, you find yourself some mornings rolling out of bed at the latest time possible. There are times that you say “hello” to people out of instinct. The opportunity to learn and gather useful and helpful information from teachers or professors instead becomes a time where you're physically present yet mentally absent. This all just barely scratches the struggles of what would be called your daily routine.

Hearing people I normally come in contact with on a daily basis discuss the deaths of friends or relatives that have occurred in the last month alone is disturbing. Then, I got to thinking. As clichéd as it may sound, we’re not guaranteed tomorrow. We’re not even guaranteed the next hour, minute, second, or even something so little as another breath.

If we lived with that idea kept in mind, how different would our lives be? How different would things be if we woke up every Monday morning excited to start a fresh new day -- a fresh new week? How different would life be if we pursued full engagement in everything we did, giving our all and giving everything our one hundred percent?

I plead with you to become engaged.

Live life to its fullest potential. Engage in a genuine conversation. Genuinely engage in the opportunity to learn and grow your knowledge. Do things that you would never normally get to do or would even think to do. Do the things that you dreamed you'd pursue. Don't let the opportunities that you have received go to waste. In the end, it all comes down to appreciating the thing we call life. You don't want to finish this life with regrets. You don't want to regret the way you finished this life. It all comes down to one idea: live.

After all, when time begins to come to an end, you don’t want to be left thinking about the things that were never done.