"Currently in this moment, you are the youngest you will ever be and the oldest you have ever been. Before you take your next breath, hallucinate your dreams, and let it enlighten you towards your desires. Time is ticking rapidly, make the best of it." -Shahrukh Nasim.

When you're in college, life seems endless. College is all about planning for the next 40 to 50 years of your life, and when you're only in your 20s, that seems like forever. But in reality, life is very short. The years fly by, and suddenly, 40 or 50 years doesn't seem like anything at all. And that is the trap we all fall into. We think we have more time than we have, that we can wait and push something off for another day because we have the time, when in reality, we have no idea how much time we have.

Two weeks ago, a senior at my school passed away in this dorm room. He was 23, a nationally ranked wrestler, and about to graduate with his whole life ahead of him. But one Saturday night, that whole life ended. I never knew him, but every time someone so close in age to me dies, it hits a little closer to home. Because I live my life like I have all the time that I could ever want. I give people the silent treatment, I hold grudges, I pretend everything's okay when nothing could by farther from the truth because I always think that I can fix it another time. But why? Why do this to myself and to the people I love, when tomorrow I or they could be gone?

Why be anything but happy in this life?

I've recently gone through some pretty rough personal changes that have forced me to reexamine how I live my life and how I define my happiness. I've always been the kind of person that defined my happiness in terms of other people. I was happy if my friends were happy with me. I was happy if the person I was dating was happy with me. Anything that indicated that they were unhappy with me could destroy a day that otherwise was going very well for me. I always thought that that meant I was just sensitive and a good friend, but I now see that that behavior is self-destructive. I was sacrificing energy being upset about perceived slights and stupid arguments that could have been spent talking about what happened and moving past it.

Now more than ever, I see the need to define my happiness from the inside. I need to recognize that my happiness starts with me, not with others and what they think of me. Why spend a life time so caught up in what other people think that life never truly starts? I'm doing what I need to do to be happy, not what other people need me to do for them to be happy. I still love my friends and would still do anything for them, but I won't sacrifice my happiness any longer.

The moral of the story is this: Don't let others steal your happiness, because you never know what tomorrow brings.