I went to a concert last week in the city with one of my good friends from high school and one of her friends from college. We drove to the venue on a breezy summer day listening to Birdy, the artist we were going to see and started talking about friends, travelling, careers and the future. Our 30-minute car ride to the concert was a rather deep life-talk, and it was a lovely chat that I think I needed. It also left me pondering the questions we were asking one another, and I decided to expand upon those thoughts and try to figure them out here, so wish me luck.

My friend and I always seem to talk about important things, and I can always count on her to not only listen to my qualms, but offer some real insight and stories that lead us to these meaningful conversations. We were lightheartedly talking about other subject material at the beginning of the drive, but our conversation turned to friends for a while. My friend and I share mostly the same high school friends, but our college life diverged and we met other people as well.

What we both came to find is that it is shockingly healthy to grow in college and continue to expand your circle of friends and trim it a bit as well. There’s no use in keeping people from all walks of life and parts of your past around if you realize that you are neither having fun with them nor growing alongside them. If people you associate with are not interested in what you are interested in, not enjoyable to be around, or don’t support you and become your biggest hype men and women, then they do not deserve to know all of the complexities that make you get up in the morning or dream at night. If you don’t want someone in your life for these reasons or other legitimate ones, then it will not be difficult to move on from them.

One of our additional main points on the drive was about friends and the relation to going abroad. My friend is travelling to New Zealand in a matter of weeks and I will be travelling to Spain next year as well. We both are so extremely excited to leave and start a new adventure, and we both were shocked to find some people were not. What our reasoning boiled down to is that the point of going abroad isn’t the physical act of getting on a plane and crossing an ocean. Rather, the mindset that pushes one to go abroad is what is important, and it has much more to do with the outlook on life and gaining a perspective than it does going on a prolonged vacation.

Although I haven’t actually crossed the ocean yet to go abroad, I can tell you what separates mindsets that want to travel and those that don’t. Some people are just built to stay in a bigger comfort zone and prefer to hang around their usual spots and home, which is perfectly fine. Our view, however, was that if you have the means to take that plane and live in a different country, then you better go. Life happens once, and it’s really an obligation to pack as many activities and experiences into it as possible. There’s so much more to life than the small suburban bubble I call home. I love it here and there are memories I will hold dear forever, but there are too many wonderful people to meet and too many life-changing moments to partake in elsewhere that I would be a fool not to leave.

Friends and family will be here when I get back and I will love the reunion I am welcomed back with when I return, but I’m not concerned about missing anything here. I’ll certainly miss those friends and family and some of the small things I take for granted here, but I am more than ready to be thrown into a new situation that demands my full attention and full presence.

That’s the third and final point I’d like to touch on: presence. While we didn’t get a chance to discuss it on the drive, I’ve been thinking about being present quite a bit this summer. Perhaps it’s due to more free time and pondering questions I don’t have time for during the school year, but I have vowed to myself to be extremely present in moments from now on. I realized how often I check my phone when I go places or when I’m with friends, or how I start to think about what I already have to do tomorrow or next week or next year. I’ve decided that that’s really no way to live. Instead, why not be completely present and attentive to the moment at hand and the people I’m with?

I think I’ve come to a junction in my college career when I’ve been able to look back on the last two years and look forward to the next two with more clarity. I’ve learned what to do and what not to do and how to be the best version of myself. I suppose college is meant to do that in an inadvertent way: teach you academics, but force you to be independent and realize that you are not only able to make Easy Mac at 2 a.m., but also run your own world and decide what is going to make you the happiest.

It seems only fitting to end this recap of my ride to Birdy with her own words, so here you have it, my favorite Birdy song: