I’ve always been someone who plans ahead. Whether it’s a short-term school assignment or my actual entire life, I’ve been taking steps to make my path into both the near and distant future less stressful, more organized, and, overall, easier.

Juggling difficult schedules at college has forced me to become more comfortable with loosening my rigid plan-ahead-ism, in terms of short-term needs and homework assignments, because I came to a point at which I quite literally could not keep up with everything I was trying to do. I also reached a point at which I forced myself to recognize that I couldn’t plan my whole life out. I could have goals and aspirations and options, and certainly distant dreams, but an exact plan was impossible. This was primarily because my goals for my future kept changing and I realized that even though I knew exactly what I loved to do (write creatively), that didn’t mean I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

But now, the end of my college career is looming ever closer. It still feels incredibly surreal to think about that (the end!), but I know I actually need to start thinking about specific post-grad plans. The thing is, when I start thinking about that, I feel myself falling back into the mindset in which I create possible plans or visions and then can’t help but imagine myself within those visions and it becomes increasingly harder to remind myself that these dreams aren’t realized yet. Even as I tell myself to stop fantasizing, I continue, because I’ve never been able to stop dreaming. I find myself asking this question: how do I plan ahead while also grounding myself and remembering to appreciate the moment I’m still in?

I think my problem lies mainly in the fact that the post-grad plans I’m entertaining require a lot of forethought and, well, planning. So I’m forced to think ahead and look to the future for those things. But I don’t want to get so caught up in this planning that I don’t appreciate my last year and half of college. That feels pretty cheesy to say—“Live in the moment” is what everyone says at some point—but it really does ring true for me at this point in my life.

I’ve decided that I’ll try my best to achieve a balance between the two—between planning/doing what I need to do to go after what I want, and cherishing the aspects of college that I know I’m going to miss when I’m out of here. Also, a key component of this is not counting on one post-grad or life dream. I’ve realized this within the past few years; things never turn out exactly how I dream them. Literally ever. So, the best approach is to have several options and hope that one of them works out, and then enjoy that one option to the fullest.