We all go on vacations and adventures. We travel with our families and friends, whether it is to the backyard tree house where you could escape from reality, or if it was across seas to beautiful lands that others dream about going to. But our biggest adventure or trip that we take in life is the trip towards maturity. Sometimes people take this trip earlier than others, and some that take it later than others. No matter how much we want to deny it, we all have to mature at some point in time and enter the real world where sometimes we cannot call mom for help and we have to solve the problem on our own. We have to mature. I am here to tell you that just because you mature does not mean you have to leave Neverland behind. There are three rules that you need to remember in your life that will help led to happiness.
Stay positive. How can you be happy if you are going to be negative? Staying positive is a game changer in a life that it is amazing at how much can come from them. If you are sitting around complaining about how it is raining outside, or thinking about all the things you want and not all the things you have, you are never going to be grateful and happy because you are always going to want more. Wanting forces you to forget about your true needs. You have a roof over your head, food in your pantry and running water in your house. That is so much to ask for, and yet we take it all for granted - myself included in that. But there are so many people in just the United States that do not have a roof over their head, their food comes from a window from a stranger car and their “running water” comes from a river or a lake that they find near them. This does not include the people across the world who have to walk miles a day to get a bucket of water for their family or the number of children who are left on the streets because their families cannot take care of them. So stay positive. Find the sunshine through the clouds. Think of all the things you have compared to what you want.
Work as hard as you can in one single day. Being a division one athlete, we always were told to go out there and work hard. Whether we were running sprints or playing a game or at practice, we were always told to work hard. But as I matured, I realized that this goes for everything in your life: in the classroom, in your house or at your job. It can be for your social life and your personal life. The key to it is “one single day." This changes the meaning of the rule completely. As soccer has taught me, you will have days that are amazing, and days that are miserable. Every day is going to be a new one - a new day for new mistakes and new successes. We can choose to go out and half-ass our way through life, but in the end, you will not be satisfied with what you have.This will leave you wanting more, which is then leading you to break rule number one.
Always be joyful. The key to is not to be happy all the time. Being happy all the time is impossible. You will never meet a person who can honestly say that they have been happy their entire lives. However, you can be joyful your whole life. Having joy is having the ability to suffer through the pain and still be thankful. Tomorrow marks a year a being without one of my best friends. She passed away because all of her organs failed to no fault of her own. She was about to start her freshman year of college and she was one of kindest people I have every met in my life. She always had joy deeply rooted in her heart. After her death and days of crying and sadness, I realized that she didn’t want me to live like this. She would want me to be celebrating her life and for me to be thankful for everything that I was given. She would want me to go on with joy; she would want to me thrive and for me to be happy when I thought of her and all of our times together. It was hard -- it is still hard -- but it is worth it. Having joy rooted deeply in your heart is something that can change your life forever. You change the person you are and become more pleasant to be around. You stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about the lives around you.
There will be days where it seems like nothing is going your way and all you want to do is to sulk. Those are the most important days. It is those days in which you are able to set the stage for what you want to do with the rest of your life. The moment when you are able to take the horrible days and turn them into the best days is going to be the moment that you are able to mature and step up to your full potential. Yes, you can still call your mom because you miss her or because you think you broke the dishwasher. Yes, you can still go hide in Neverland and be a fairy princess from time to time. But your happiness will come when you are able to be positive when it is raining and you were supposed to go play golf. When you are pushing yourself to write the absolute best paper ever for only 5 percent of your grade, or when you are pushing yourself to complete the big group project two days before your boss wanted. So run off to Neverland and fight dragons, but do it in the right way. Mature in happiness and in the proper way!
