On saving joy, postponing dreams, and learning to live now
While packing for college, I found a pack of unopened stickers I had tucked away when I was six, saving them for a special tomorrow. They were still perfect, untouched, frozen in time. Standing there, trying to compress the entirety of my childhood into two suitcases and preparing to move to an entirely new world, I wondered how many times I had reached for those stickers and stopped myself. How often I told myself, later.
That packet survived years of growing up not because it was precious, but because I kept postponing joy; waiting for a ‘tomorrow’ that never came.
The human instinct to save.
We humans have a strange habit of saving things. We save our favourite clothes for a day that never arrives, our kindest words for people we might lose, and our dreams for a version of ourselves that never quite shows up. We believe that by holding back, we are protecting something. That restraint adds value. That waiting will somehow make the moment purer, more deserving.
But most of the time, all it does is turn life into a rehearsal that never reaches opening night.
Dreams don’t always die loudly.
In a country like ours, this story repeats itself endlessly. How many engineers and doctors were once artists? How many dancers, writers, and musicians were told their dreams were impractical, unsafe, too fragile to survive reality? So they folded their art like a letter never sent. They learned to measure success in paychecks instead of passion. They learned to call survival, ‘ambition’.
Dreams don’t always die loudly.
Sometimes they just grow quiet under the weight of expectation, until even the dreamer forgets the sound of their own wanting.
Waiting for a “special tomorrow”.
We keep the fine glassware tucked away, waiting for a special occasion that somehow never makes it onto the calendar. But what makes a day special? Is it rarity, or attention? Isn’t an ordinary evening, shared with people we love, already enough? We postpone beauty as if life has promised us a grand finale, as if joy must be earned, as if today is only a draft.
What saving really costs us.
We think saving something preserves its value. But value fades the longer it is hidden. The sari kept safe in a cupboard still frays with time. The “good” perfume evaporates in its sealed bottle. Letters yellow. Memories blur. And when we’re gone, the things we cherished are often sold to strangers who will never know what they meant.
What was priceless to us becomes someone else’s bargain.
Gentleness, offered too late.
We say, don’t speak unkindly of the dead. But maybe we should start by not speaking unkindly of the living. Why do we save our gentleness like fine silverware, only polishing it when someone’s gone? What if we offered it now, while people can still hear it, still blush under its warmth, still know they mattered?
Kindness does not lose value when it is used.
It multiplies.
The universe will go on without us. Stars will be born. Galaxies will collide. Time will stretch endlessly forward.
But we will not.
Here is the quiet truth we resist: time doesn’t pause. It doesn’t care about our plans or our fears. It flows steadily, carrying away everything we swear we’ll get to someday.
And in our brief, luminous moments, the only real mark we leave is not on the universe, but on each other.
So maybe the point isn’t to save the best for last.
Maybe it’s to use the stickers now.
Chip the good china.
Spill the tea.
Wear the favourite outfit on an ordinary Tuesday.
Say the thing you’re scared to say.
Live as though this is the special occasion.
Because it is.
Do not save the best for last.
There may be no last.
There is only now.
And now needs to be enough.
For more such articles visit Her Campus at MUJ. And for a tour in my corner, visit Jenya Pandey at HCMUJ.