Life seems to be simultaneously whooshing by all too quick and much too slow. Days either feel like nighttime will never come or that my entire day slipped away from me. As days go by, I'm starting to realize that one of the scarier aspects in life is when you see time slipping away but you can't seem to slow it down. You look up and it's the beginning of August. You glance down for a moment but when you focus your attention up again it's somehow October.

I have been in a very confusing state of mind recently. I'm caught in a limbo between wanting it to be May so I can graduate and move to the next phase, while also wanting my days to grow longer so there's more time to bask in the essence of senior year. When it's a Sunday night and I'm laying in bed thinking of the three tests I have that week, I want nothing more than for it to be the following Friday afternoon. When it's a Sunday night after the week I've had three tests, I'm laying there again thinking of how quickly seven days can pass without notice when you're busy.

I think this is why senior year feels completely different than any other year for me. There is more pressure, mostly from me, to go out and say yes to everything. I'm saying yes to new projects, I'm going to all the club meetings I can, I'm going to all the sporting events that I'm around for, I'm going out with friends more than ever, and I'm even busier with school work. I've been walking a very rocky line of feeling like I need to do everything possible. Sometimes that can backfire and other times its perfect. I want to be able to look back at this time and see everything I've done. When I don't have the time to second guess myself or worry I just end up "doing" instead. Overwhelming myself (to a degree) in work and activities is where I feel I thrive the most.That gratifying feeling of accomplishment from finishing a really hard week, getting everything I wanted and more done, is what makes it all worth it for me.

However, there's one major unexpected downside. Time is slipping away from me faster than I can grasp. I'm saying hello as fast as I'm saying goodbye. Somehow I'm halfway through my second to last semester of undergraduate. I can physically see each week keep passing by, turning my calendars to a new month, but I can't slow it down. When the week is gone there's no going back and I realize that. Yet, I still find myself trying to speed through time and get "to the end", when there really is no end. I may finish undergraduate but I still have two years of graduate school, after that is working and moving on in life. There's no end because it doesn't matter what I'll be doing since that's all in the future. The funny thing is that I'm not in the future. I am right here, right now. Sometimes when I get those frightening glimpses of how much time has really passed or how much time is left, I'm starting to realize it's my mind is forgetting that if I focus on the now time will slow down exponentially.

I'm grateful for everything I've been doing the past few months. I'm grateful for being so busy all the time, I just need to remember that sometimes good things come at a price. The Achilles Heel, if you will, to having an excitingly packed schedule is moments where you see time ticking away faster and faster and you know that exact moment will be gone soon. I know I'm not the only one that is confused by what I really time to be doing. Almost all of us wish for fall and when that ends, wish for summer, and when that gets too hot we go back to wishing for fall. That's how life is. Constant cycles of wanting the next thing to come or go back to whats happened. What I'm really working on, is seeing the now, taking a step back, seeing the whole picture, and appreciating that it doesn't matter if I'm busy or not I can still slow life down a notch or two and smile a little more through it all.