It starts your freshman year of high school: The realization that you won't live at home with mom and dad for the rest of your life, wrapped in the comfort of home cooked meals and support. Those next four years in high school fly by faster than you could ever imagine, with little warning.
You know you're not a youngin' anymore when people are always saying, "Oh my gosh, that was how many years ago?" during lunch. The next thing you know you're a sophomore in college watching your sister graduate from college. Meanwhile, a full-blown explosion happens in your brain due to the ultra-fast path you're on to adulthood.
Time screws over everyone. She takes people from you faster than you want, she gives you people at the most inconvenient moments in life, and she makes your childhood feel like a story you read a couple days ago at the coffee shop.
At moments, it can feel pretty sad - realizing that you aren't going to permanently live at home with your siblings and dogs ever again (at least that's the goal here, right?). My parents are starting to do things just the two of them now that my sisters and I are grown up and out of the house, and I'm still not used to being unable to attend those events.
My point here is that it's so easy to feel like you're running out of time, or that these awesome moments in your life are slipping right through your fingers. So, pick up your things and run with it. Be the most productive person you can, offer positivity to those around you, and remind yourself that there's never a bad time to take up an opportunity that arises.
Attachment is something that causes us to feel like life is a kind of a boring thing. We grow up, go to college (or maybe just start working), and get a job. Then we maybe have kids, and that is that. There are so many conversations about how we're supposed to work until we die and there's "not much to life" that I have been involved in. We get this idea out of the fact that we get so attached to our surroundings.
We are attached to the homes that we grow up in and the towns that we run through during our first twenty years of life. We literally choose where to get our education from based off of our best friends or boyfriends - like think of how common that story is.
I don't believe that that's how life is supposed to be. Think of all the ways your life could be different if you welcomed opportunities that maybe force things to be more different than you'd like them to be. Think about how things would go if you took that job across the country from your family, or if you went to a university knowing no one. Time is running so fast. You don't have time to not do something because it seems too out of your reach.
Being in a slump, too, offers little to no help when it comes to taking advantage of every moment. Life doesn't always seem so fruitful. Sometimes nothing inspiring is happening and days are passing by which turns into months, and soon enough it's been four years and, well, you are mind-numbingly bored. And I guess that's the lifestyle I am on the run from.
Your life doesn't need to be dictated by the clock. Yes, time is speeding by, but that's all the more reason to keep up.
