Enjoy it while your here.

What is the phrase that everyone utters once they find out that you are in college?  What is the universal piece of advice that they give to you, whether they are eighty or merely just a recent grad from the college scene?  Is it to watch out for the freshman fifteen?  Is it to not party your education away?  Is it to walk in groups if you’re out after dark?  While all of these things are great adages for your college career, I am referring to a much more sincere phrase, “Enjoy it while it’s here”. In high school I used to resent those words with a passion and yet since I have made the transition to college and “enjoyed” a full year of it that I still hear my elders giving me that same age old saying.  However, since I have left the confines of my home town, I finally see exactly what it is they were talking about. 

First off, I have, after looking back on my freshman year, felt the speed in which time can quickly slip through your fingers.  One minute I was moving into my dorm and then, within the blink of an eye it seems, I was trying to cram as much fun as I could in the final weeks of spring semester.  I can see the hundreds of faces of the people that I have befriended in just a year’s time and can only imagine the hundreds more I'll make in the not so distant future. The memories I’ve made with these people in this short gap of time are ones that will make me laugh to the point of tears and can never be replaced.

 I have learned that these four, five, or even six years of independence and youth are our last chances at living a wild and carless lifestyle outside of our comfort zones. This is not to say that you should become reckless with your body and school work; college is a place where you are supposed to build the rest of your life upon, so don’t throw it to the wind. The point I am trying to make is that you shouldn’t let others dictate what you should or shouldn’t do because “that’s the way you’re supposed to behave”. This is the chance in your life to be endlessly single or to find the love of your life. To become the life of the party and be whoever you want to be. 

This place in time is the limbo between childhood and the oh so ominous real world. The real world is the endgame for this fast life you are living and the beginning of nine to five jobs and dreaded responsibilities that put you in bed no later than ten O’clock. I for one do not eagerly anticipate the time of mortgages and the cutthroat job market. There will be a time when we are ready for those things and will want to face them head on with confidence, but that time is tomorrow, not today. So when the wise old men and women tell me to enjoy college while I have it, I’ll inform them that I am. I’m having the time of my life. 

Hail Southern.