When you come home from college everybody has a million questions for you about the year and what is to come. How are classes? Do you like it there? How did you survive that Syracuse winter? What are you doing for the summer? What are you doing with the rest of your life?
These questions may all sound different but they really are the same question. That question being: do you have it all together yet?
As a generation we have been trained to constantly look ahead and think about what we should be doing or how to get there. We are a very driven generation, something that we should pride ourselves in, but at the same time we need to take a moment to embrace the moment we are in.
We are lucky enough to live in a period of time where everything is at our fingertips. We can know what is happening in Asia or in the Middle East seconds after it happens thanks to social media and the 24-hour news cycle. We are able to contribute to conversations that happening all over the world with the use of a hash tag. This gift is also a burden on our generation because we are inundated with information 24/7.
Never is there a time during my day when I am not aware of what is happening in the world. Although is incredible for a budding journalist it is also incredibly hard to be a college kid. At a time when we are supposed to be making mistakes, questioning things and beginning to plan for our futures we have been trained to think we should already know the answer to the questions.
At this time in our lives it’s ok if we don’t know what we want to do in 20 years – I don’t even know what I want to eat for dinner everyday. Chances are our ideas, opinions, and goals for the future will change overtime because that’s life. Our parents are doing what they thought they would be doing 20 years ago. It’s not fair for us to believe that we need to know what we are going to do five steps from where we are.
I am the most type-A person on the planet so the idea of not having everything planned out scares the crap out of me. This year though I realized that there’s only four years in college where you can figure out who you are, what you want, and who you want to become. I plan on embracing the next three years to figure it out. Sure I am going to plan – I’m already trying to figure out next summer’s internship, but that’s who I am.
The next three years I am going to incredibly selfish and do things that make me happy, I am going to live in the moment and plan for the future at the same time. I am not going to let the idea of 20 years from now dictate every decision I make – only some.
It’s perfectly normal to not have everything figured out yet. Ida Scott Taylor once wrote:
“One day at a time- this is enough. Do not look back and grieve over the past, for it is gone; and not be troubled about the future, for it has not yet come. Live in the present, and make it so beautiful that it will be worth remembering.”
The present is all we have control over, so why not start living in it?
