A prevailing theme of my final year of high school has been time: the lack of it before a test, too much of it when sitting through a lecture...

While time itself is conceptually infinite, the time we have on this earth is quantified to a lifetime. And so, in the coming generations, with ambition and dreams and passions and hopes, there is a focus on maximizing every second of our time—living life to the fullest, if you will.

This week, I have the privilege of wandering the streets of Chicago, a beautiful metropolitan city complete with tall towers and the lilt of the banks of Lake Michigan. I have the utmost admiration for the greatness that is the Windy City. However, I've also been able to note the fast-paced nature of this city. Pedestrians crossing the street must be wary of taxis cutting around the corner split-seconds away from hitting them. I've seen, more than enough times, a bus and a car almost colliding, in which both honk and at least one speeds away. And this is the culture of the city -- where "Hello" is translated to "I am a tourist," and the city greeting is the click clack of dress shoes and a brief interlude of the muffled sounds coming from the earbuds of a passerby.

Living this culture in the observant third-person limited, I can't help but reflect upon my life back home. While I do greet people properly, and take an hour or two out of my weekend to relax, in most of my high school experience, I have been running around. I pulled out my planner, and saw that lined on all the sheets are hour-by-hour schedules for the day. And yes, this method of meticulous planning did help guarantee a more predictably stable lifestyle that contributed to my contentedness, but I can't say that until the end of my high school time that I felt truly, genuinely happy at school.

There is an element of spontaneity in feeling elatedness, a rare extreme of happiness that makes life honestly, worth living. The monotony of living a life that is simply content beats the rhythm of planning. There are a plethora of options for how each second of life will be spent, and so we, as I speak from my own experiences, work to eliminate these options to what may best guarantee what we've coined as "happiness."

Things that are important: exploration, limitless, spontaneity. While it's important to care for your well-being by providing some sense of stability, it's equally as important to give yourself a reason to be providing this sense of stability -- the leeway to feel honest, unadulterated happiness.