When you’re young, nothing truly matters. No seriously, think about it. Nothing truly matters. You’re a child, new to the world, new to life, and all of its misadventures and mishaps. You’ve yet to understand that every step you take, every thought you think out loud, and everything you do has a consequence in some way or another.

At 10 years old, you’re told not eat sweets before your dinner. At 13, you’re instructed to go to bed at a decent hour (whatever the hell that means). “Don’t do that, it’s not good for you,” and “Get down before you hurt yourself,” are common phrases that most adolescents hear growing up. Then, in the blink of an eye, you’re walking across the stage, preparing to haphazardly shake the hand of the principal you hated for four years all because of that one day freshman year when he snatched your baseball cap from off of you while you were in the middle of a pickup line you’ve been working on for weeks in an attempt to "woo" your high school crush. You smile and take in deep breath as you prance down the two or three steps and join the rest of your now former classmates, who all just want to band to play that final song so that you can kiss it all goodbye.

You blink again, and it’s two a.m. in the morning, four years later. You run your fingers through your messy hair, letting them slide down the back of your neck as you attempt to relieve yourself by way of a small neck massage. Going out to that party probably wasn’t the smartest idea. You knew you had a final at 10 a.m. the next day, but you also knew that the biggest party of the year was going down with, or without you. You gave a middle finger to the latter of those two, threw on your dancing shoes, and partied like it was 1989. Now you’re regretting every shot of Burnett’s as you look at the mother of all study guides, laden with chapters and sub chapters of material that you can’t even begin to recall looking at. “Jesus Christ” you whisper to yourself as you flip open a book that you forgot you even owned and prepare yourself the longest day ever.

As the sun begins to rise on your already heated situation, voices resonate through your brain. “Did you finish your homework?” you glance to the left, checking the study guide to the chapter you’re on. “It’s late you need to go bed, you have school in the morning.” You indulge in some coffee, now lukewarm, as you flip through the glossary in the back of the book. Everything your parents told you as a child is slowly coming back to you, delivering jab after jab after jab. Every incident where you were scolded, spanked or grounded is bobbing and weaving, all while throwing jabs from deep within your memory. You begin to realize that mommy and daddy weren’t out to get you. They were trying to prepare you, for this moment, and many more like it. Now read the first line in this trip through time again.

If for some reason you still believe that when you’re young nothing truly matters, congratulations.

You blinked as you turned in that final, and two years came and went. You’re sitting in your studio apartment, scrolling through Netflix as though it were the Internet itself. You can’t find anything to watch because truthfully you’re not even thinking about Netflix. Your mind is so far from the 32 inch Vizio flat screen TV that you knocked a little old lady down for on Black Friday it’s almost hysterical. Your head is so deep into what’s going on in your damn bank account, you might look up and find yourself at the front desk of a Wells Fargo.

Rent was due last week, you’ve got a car payment due tomorrow, and let’s not forget about your gym membership to the gym you never go to and the subscription to Hulu Plus (as you scroll through Netflix’s new releases). Your mind goes blank, and as you bend over in your extremely overpriced Ikea leather sofa and place your head in your hands, you realize two things: The job that you have right now is never going to truly support your BET, rap video lifestyle. The second epiphany is that when you were young, none of this even matter. The only bills you had to worry about were the dollar bills under your bed the morning after you lost a tooth (If you even got that much). If you were blessed, you went to school and then you came home, so having a good job was the least of your worries. Let the adults stress about that. Yeah, because that’s what you are now. An adult.

You’re no longer a child, and as you sit in your apartment with the mother all headaches pressing upon your skull, all you want is a misadventure. You long for your parents to come outside and find you hanging upside down from a tree, so that you can hear them say, “If you don’t get down from there so help me God!” The only thing you want at that moment is for your mom to walk through the door and ask you about your homework. You pray for someone to dare you to take another shot of whiskey, even though you know damn well you’re a light weight and truly can’t hang. You want it, you want it all. All you want is to be young again, to not care again, and to live for the moment again.

And then you wake up, panting, looking from left to right. Its 8:15 a.m. and you’ve got a few minutes before class. You slap the alarm and jump out of bed. You barely have enough time to slip on a clean T-shirt. As you sprint across campus to class you try your best to replay the dream you had. Damn it almost felt real, the passage of time in the dream state, and yet it wasn’t. Simply a fabrication of the mind, because you’re still young.

So while you’re still young, be young. Act young, think young, do young things. Don’t be so quick to grow up. Enjoy the time you have, free of stress. Is it important to be prepared for the future? Of course it is, but don’t forget that the whole concept of being young has a very simple resolution, and that is that there is no going back. Because before you know it, you’ll be 30, then 40, then 50 years old, and life will have hit you like Rocky hit that Russian dude in Rocky IV. So before you blink, take in everything, because you never know where you’ll be when you open your eyes again.