We are always told to just live in the moment. This piece of advice sounds so simple—what other way is there to live but in the moment you are currently in? But still, for some reason, I would say I’m one of the biggest culprits of not living in the moment. I’m going to try to give some advice about why we need to live in the moment, not just because I think other people may need it, but because I know I need it too.
We as humans always want what we don’t have. If it is winter, we want it to be summer because we say we miss wearing shorts and going to the pool. But in the summer, we say we miss sweaters and sitting by the fireplace. When we are at school, we want it to be summer, when it’s summer, we miss school and being with our friends. When we are at home we want to go out and travel. When we do travel, we get homesick. When we are with our family, we miss our friends, when we are with our friends, we miss our family.
I’m in college now and some day I’ll wish for the time when I’m out in the “real world” and know more of what I’m doing with my life. On the other hand, I say how I want to be five years old again because then I wouldn't have anything to worry about. But when I was five, all I wanted to do was grow up. I thought the grownups knew everything and they could make all their own decisions, so of course, I wanted that. I see this happen at every stage of life. When I was in junior high, everyone wanted to be in high school. Then, when you finally get to high school, everyone is waiting to go to college. We are never happy with having just exactly what we have. But what we have is what we should be happy with.
You can miss the great times you’ve had in the past. You can think about all the fun you had as a kid or your awkward years as a preteen, and you can look back and smile about what you did. You can also look forward to the future. You can be excited about where your life will take you. In fact, you should be excited about where your life will take you. But you can’t spend all your time wishing you had a moment back or wishing you could fast-forward your life into a different moment.
Right now, you are in this moment. You are in this point of your life. Maybe it’s not a great moment for you, maybe it’s the best moment you have ever had. But in order to truly live life to the fullest, we have to appreciate where life has us right now, because we don’t know where we are going, but we do know where we have gone and we know what we miss about it. So live in the moment—you never know what you will miss about it until it’s gone.
