“Your journey has molded you for your greater good, and it was exactly what it needed to be. Don’t think that you’ve lost time. It took each and every situation you have encountered to bring you to the now. And now is right on time.” – Asha Tyson
At this point in time, you’ve been alive for about two decades — give or take a few years. About 20 years of life have passed by, and with these years, have come many difficult experiences. When you’re young, it’s easy to feel like the smallest of problems are the end of the world. You might get put in timeout in school or your mother may not have given you allowance for a week because you talked back to her… You know, the kind of situations that you look back on later in life and laugh about? You can laugh about these things later on because you’ve learned that the hard times get harder as you get older, and you wish you could go back to the days when your greatest care in the world was what you were having for dinner.
College is a time of reflection and nostalgia for a lot of us. I think about the past all the time, and it makes me grateful that I have time to grow and learn from it in the future. I find myself getting caught up in wishing I could go back to a certain day or a certain event that I wish had happened differently. I want so badly to undo the past, and it frustrates me that I can’t turn back time and make things right.
When I get like this, I have to remind myself that even though I may not understand why something happened to me or why I made a choice that I made, I would be a completely different person without it. Feeling like you’ve lost time is one of the hardest things to overcome. I could name quite a few experiences I’ve had that I wish I had cherished more at the time. It isn’t easy to come to peace with the past, but it is necessary to do so in order to avoid hindering your future. Your life is what you make it, and there is no time better than now to make it what you want it to be. Take all of that past frustration and use it to fuel the fire of your future. There will never be another day that is exactly like today, so embrace it for what it is and allow yourself to continue learning each step of the way.