Dear [insert your name here],

Congratulations on making it through your first semester as a college student! While you still have a ways to go until you're in my shoes, take a second to pat yourself on the back (as cliché as that sounds) for making it through with only a few bumps and bruises along the way. It's not always an easy transition from high school to college, so something as minuscule as surviving a fifteen-week schedule is actually something in which to be proud.

But, when the pride you have in yourself subsides and the mounds of work resurface, take a second to heed this warning: this marvelously horrible, painful, joyous, exciting, and mysterious ride that you call the next three-and-a-half years of your life is going to go by more quickly than I can properly quantify. I already used a cliché earlier, and I'm not one to condone using too many platitudes; but you're going to blink, and it's going to be over.

This warning is something I wish I took seriously when the roles were reversed and I was the second semester freshman with seemingly endless time in front of me to make the most of the "best four years" of my life. But, I didn't. I'm not saying I didn't make the most of my time, but with the thought of finals fresh in my mind and how every second ticked away as if it were a lifetime, I thought that the rest of my time in college would be as slow moving.

I was wrong.

It may not have been as quick as a blink, but the comparison is still relevant. Yesterday, I was sitting through a gruelingly frightening, yet enlightening, ceremony welcoming me into an institution of higher learning; and today, the world is bracing itself for my release into reality. Before you know it, you're going to be exactly where I now find myself with a lot of regrets that I perhaps could have done even more.

So...make the most of this "blink". Explore. Travel. Get lost. Find yourself. Find someone else to make the mundane moments seem that much more special. Take a class you never thought you'd take. Sit in your room for an entire day without interacting with anyone. Fall asleep on a couch in the library. Do absolutely everything that you can until your clock hits midnight. Don't leave any stone unturned, any hill unclimbed, any opportunity untried.

Live.

Sincerely,

A Senior Who Wishes He Had More Time