It’s weird to think we spend most of our lives waiting for those big events: high school, your license, graduation, college, your first job, your wedding, your children—any big milestone that you want to fulfill. We spend our entire lives for these little slivers of happiness, for only a few seconds.

When you go to high school it’s this big, new experience that you have waited for all your childhood for, until the excitement wears off and you’re just in school. It takes about two weeks for the feeling to fade.

Then you get your license. It’s fun, entertaining. You finally have real responsibilities, until you drive every day.

Graduation comes around and you can’t wait to finally be done with graduation practice and high school—for your life to really begin because everything before that moment was leading up to graduation.

Graduation passes, summer comes to an end, and college begins. You have all these new experiences, a new life, friends, adventures, but it feels like everything else in your life. The new experiences come to an end. You get used to everything—the college life, your living situation, you friends, and you start to wait for what comes next.

We miss what’s happening today because we cannot wait for tomorrow. We waste away those little moments in life that ad up over the years because we just wait.

We wait for those two weeks of happiness, for those twenty-minute interviews that can determine your future, your graduation that does not demonstrate the real achievements you have earned.

I’m tired of waiting, not living my life to the fullest, of wishing something new would come. I’ve been saying it all semester, but I cannot wait for next year, and because of that I’ve missed out on this semester. I’ve been checked out. I do the same things every day. I go to class. I go to my dorm. I take a nap. I read. I watch Netflix. I procrastinate on my homework. I do my homework. I stay up because I don’t want tomorrow to come because I know exactly what I will be doing, the same thing I did the day before and the day before that. Waiting for the semester to end, for next year to begin even though I know what will happen. It will be exciting and new, and I will love it until I won’t. until I get tired of it and fall back into the same patterns. Well, no more.

I am done waiting. I want to live from day to day, not week to week. It starts now.