I once ran up to the top of a giant sand dune on the side of a winding highway bordered by this body of sand on one side and a body of water, the Pacific Ocean, on the other. The Pacific came right up to the edge of the road, right below the guard rail. The sand spilled onto the road from the other side where the dune was, and the pavement was just a tiny stretch in between them, interrupting a natural beach. As I ran up the dune, often walking, often dragging myself up, and usually looking back and down to see the tiny cars and specks of people below, I thought I was on a different planet. It was an out-of-body experience and I thought I was dreaming it. The fact is, I was obviously not on a different planet, but rather on Earth. The same Earth I’ve grown up on my whole life, the same Earth that I always think I know and am used to. I decided during this climb, however, that I no longer had the right to think I had seen Earth or to be comfortable on it, because this planet has so much more to explore than what I am used to.

It’s funny that I thought I knew what this planet we spin around on is all about and that I was really making the most of my days. I’ve thought all my life that I’m really “living” and doing my best every day and squeezing the most out of life, but I haven’t even scraped the surface. I started to especially feel bogged down by this in college. Worrying about future jobs, post-graduate requirements, money, a résumé, and other scary responsibilities shut me down and made me robotic like everyone else. We all do the same things every day. We go to class, feel exhausted and stressed and cope with Netflix or sleeping, eat at the dining hall, and sit in our dorm rooms, repeating the cycle every… single… day. We waste days at a time sleeping because we are too tired. We let sunrises and sunsets pass without looking out the window because our favorite season on Netflix is coming to an end.

It’s time to break the cycle. Life is not about pouring all of your energy into a homework assignment and staying up until the early hours of the morning just to then wreck your eating and sleeping schedule and set you back for weeks at a time. Life is not about being so seemingly exhausted that you miss out on what’s happening in the world around you, because the world does not wait. Opportunities do not linger just for you, people do not just stop on a dime to wait for you to catch up, and places do not stay frozen in time just for you to see how beautiful they are. If you don’t wake up from your daily nap or peel your eyes away from your computer screen, then you’ll miss everything. Why wake up when you’re eighty or ninety years old with an aching heart because you never saw that city or never met that person you should’ve made time for? Why go to bed at night at eighty or ninety years old wishing you had boarded that plane or bought that ticket? Look at all the time we have in front of us now. It would be criminal to waste it.

There’s so much to do right now. There are so many places to visit and explore. Study abroad if you can and leave nothing unturned when you do. Do everything and leave nothing undone. Work hard to afford a trip somewhere in the U.S. There are thousands of beautiful places to touch down in and explore for a few days. Go to that concert on a Tuesday night if it means you do your work before or after. Go get dinner with someone you haven’t seen for a while. Take a day trip somewhere new. Leave what you’re used to and what’s comfortable and you will find so many more things that you will come to know and love.

I did eventually reach the top of that sand dune. I was on the Pacific Highway in California near Malibu. It was later in the afternoon and the sun was hitting the rough rocks and sand at the top of the dune before an imminent sunset. I stood up there for a few minutes as I watched cars whiz by below and the great Pacific Ocean swell calmly out to where the sky meets the sea. There were other people climbing up and down the dune, but no one was talking. We were all just standing there, in awe. Like you read in books or see in movies, time stopped and everything was still. Earth is literally drop dead gorgeous. It’s a natural phenomenon that steals your breath and speeds up your heartbeat because it’s too much for you to understand but just enough for you to try to grasp. Everything else in this life besides exploring the world, exploring your own head and exploring your own heart are trivial. There’s so much more out there than the four walls of your dorm room or the blinding screen of your laptop. Go find it.