The older I get, the more I realize what a hurry I’ve been in to grow up. When I was in elementary school I couldn’t wait to be in middle school and have harder classes. Once middle school came, high school became the dream and I was begging my mom to let me wear makeup and dress “older.” Finally, high school came, and year after year I was gearing myself up for college searches and applications. My life plan would fall into play once I got to college, and my life would finally make sense; at least, that’s what my head told me. Senior year came with graduation and acceptance letters, a summer that would bring me to a six-week scholars program and early arrival on campus. Summer turned to autumn and I was officially a freshman in college, and it became waiting for Thanksgiving or Christmas break, for midterms or finals to be over.
By the time second semester rolled around, I was waiting to get over the flu, off crutches, or for my heart to heal after a bad breakup. I was waiting. I was waiting and waiting and waiting. Move-out came and summer followed suit, with days filled with me waiting for work to end or for the weekend. Then it was waiting for school to start again, waiting for move-in day. With all this waiting, I wondered, when was I living? I got to campus a fully fledged sophomore ready to tackle another year on the Hill, and I jumped from one task to the next. Homework assignments to tests to office hours, I was a balancing act waiting to fall. Suddenly it was October and my friends were heartbroken over boys and bad grades, and I realized how blind I had been to all that was going on around me.
Everybody knows that breakups in college are inevitable, they come and go like the C+ you land on an essay that you didn’t see coming. And just like them, everybody witnesses that bad grades are a fact of college too; they suck but they happen. I had been so enraptured in the waiting and jumping of life that I hadn’t noticed my friends around me were doing the same balancing act, and ultimately the damage it was doing to us. We needed some perspective. While my friend cried to me over the boy that was too in his head about homework and tried to juggle her as a sideline activity, I realized that our lives are a lot like a timeline. Each of us is gifted this timeline at birth. It starts with our birth and ends with our death. Assuming we get a good 85 years, at least, that means we have roughly 1020 months of life to live. This timeline gives us perspective. If you look at your timeline, college is really only 4 years long or 48 months long (including breaks). The same perspective could be applied to high school, jobs, or basically any aspect of your life. In the scheme of those 48 months, a lot can happen. In just a year and a quarter of college I have been through, I have endured more things than I think I ever had prior to leaving home.So if we look at those 48 months, we can begin to perceive how each event in our lives can be either big or small. Of course, we have events that change us and our courses of life, like the heart attack my Dad had in 2016; it changed not only his life but my life and the way I was living as well. Those big events, generally, have a more significant place on our timelines. They could be your wedding day or the birth of your first child, the day you really found your passion or a tragedy you endured. Those big events stay with you on your timeline. Then there’s the small events, the things that help shape you and can guide your life in new directions. This, I told my friend, is where her heartbreak would lie. Because at the time, things like heartbreak or a bad grade seem to be huge events that you will never surpass. At that moment, it seems like you will never move on or see another good day, but on the timeline of your life, they are just a blink in the eye. A breakup that takes you 3 months to get over still leaves you with 1017 more months of goodness to look forward to.
Our timelines are left completely up to us. The world will interfere, but how we choose to respond to surprises or changes is how we will ultimately shape our timeline’s course. Sadness and happiness can seem to be thresholds that come and go, but it’s all part of the path you’re on and the journey that you want to make. It’s up to you to view the little things in life and decide if you will let them alter your timeline, and in turn alter you, or whether you will acknowledge them and give yourself the most months on your timeline you can. Regardless of what you choose, just remember, your timeline is yours, and what you do in those 1020 (give or take) months is completely at your own discretion. Just make them matter to you.