Coming home for break always leads to the inevitable: reminiscing. Don’t get me wrong, I am an extremely nostalgic person and love to do so, but at the same time, sometimes I hate remembering. Not the point. My room in my house is currently in shambles because there are three girls in it, with one moving back home to get started on her clinicals, one in high school, and me just living for brief periods of time. Because of this, I have stuff all over the place, and since this was my room in high school, I have a lot of high school memorabilia making its way to the surface of the clutter. I happened to find my senior year newspaper, and read it cover to cover, enjoying it just as much as I did three years ago. One thing that stuck out to me in an article “10 years from now….” And it had so-and-so doing this, yada yada yada, and something that caught my eye was “10 years from now, I will be anywhere but here.”
This caught my attention, because of course, at one point or another, we have all felt this. Things aren’t going right with school, friends, work, family, etc., and it’d be nice to get away. I think for high schoolers, it was just us wanting to get the hell outta there in its entirety. However, as much as you want to get out of somewhere, if you can’t, you can’t, and you have to accept it and make the best of what’s around. I know it’s hard to imagine, trust me, I’ve been there. But if you continuously think about how someday will be amazing and someday you’ll have your life figured out and someday you will be happy, you will be missing out on today. Cliche, right? But, you can’t deny they truthfulness of the statement. If you are always planning how things will be in your life one day, you are not focusing on the life you are currently living, and maybe if you did, you wouldn’t want to leave it so much. (I know, I know, some people would still want to leave.) However, looking back on high school and how much I wanted to get out near the end, I loved it. Sure, it wasn’t the greatest at some points and I had all bright plans for college, (don’t get me wrong, I LOVE college), but, if I hadn’t complained about where I was and just lived it and enjoyed it, maybe I could have seen a little bit clearer that high school was pretty awesome, too. (And don’t misunderstand my take on high school, I loved it, but at the end I was incredibly ready to leave; and I was in good company.) That is something that I have learned through trial and error. Be present. Once these days are gone, you cannot get them back no matter how bad you want them. So, while you’re in them, be in them. Don’t be desperately clutching onto the past or constantly planning for the future, but live in the moment. (Cliche, I know! But, again, true.) I think right now, that is the best piece of advice I could give anyone. Don’t just exist, but live. Be present. “Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (…) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.” - John Green, Looking for Alaska
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AuthorJust a twenty-something attempting to create the illusion that I have a clue what's going on... Archives
May 2017
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