Lately, I have been finding myself constantly looking forward to new things. Whether that is an internship opportunity, traveling, the school year coming to a close and welcoming the summer season, or even being done with school altogether and officially starting an adult life.

I keep looking forward to the next phase of my life without actually enjoying the phase I am in.

College is supposed to be some of the greatest years of your life, yet we spend most of them looking forward to getting out. It is hard to admit that you do it, but everyone does. By nature, we are all dream chasers, constantly chasing one thing after another. This is something that is great. It is great to be ambitious, determined, and to be a dreamer; however, when you begin to wish your life away is when it becomes dangerous.

Like I said before, college is meant to be some of the best years of your life. You experience a personal growth like no other time in your life, you can make mistakes that you can actually redeem yourself from, you can reinvent who you want to be a thousand times over, and you make memories that will last a lifetime. Yet, we all continue to wish our way out of it. What I mean by this is we are constantly looking for what is coming next. We spend most of our days stressed out or anxious because of it. We do not take the time to simply live in the moment and be where our feet are.

There is no other time in our lives where we can have the freedom and flexibility that we have then now. So why do we constantly wish it away? Why do we constantly say we can't wait to have a job and truly "adult"? It is because we are scared of what our future holds, but also intrigued and excited by it.

We want it to get here so we know who we will be and what will become of us. But, that is not the way that life is meant to be lived. Life is meant to be lived in the moment. We should be excited by the opportunities around us now. We should be excited by the people we are surrounded by now. We should be excited by having the simplistic lifestyle and freedom we have now. We should still work at a future and continue to prepare ourselves for it, but not wish we were already there.

Imagine if you woke up one day with four years of your life gone. You woke up and suddenly you have a job, bills, and real-life responsibilities without realizing how easy you had it at that moment in time.

That is what we are doing by wishing our lives away and if we don't stop, sooner or later we will find ourselves waking up in this situation wondering where the time went. We will be wishing we could go back to college when it was easier and exciting. We will practically be having a mid-life crisis at 23 or 24 instead of our fifties.

We have the opportunity to prevent that from happening now. So we need to start doing that. We need to start living in the moment, acting on a whim of an idea and going for it. We should not hold ourselves back ever at this point in our lives because we will not get this time or its opportunities back.

It may seem like you already do this, you might, but you probably don't. You are probably just like every other person wishing their life away, you just don't realize it quite yet.

Life is a beautiful thing. It is to be cherished and never taken for granted. And, it is especially to be lived in the moment and not simply wished away. So, keep working towards your dreams and being ambitious. But, quit wishing you were already your future you. That time will come, but when it is supposed to.

Be who you are supposed to be now, have the fun and adventures you are supposed to have now and start living in the moment and time you are in, now.