For many, the idea of aging can be a very frightening thing. To see the face you’ve looked at time and time again become etched with the crevices of time and watch as your body shrivels, bends and aches in new ways is one of the many natural happenings of life that we cannot stop, but only try to slow. Apart from bodily appearance, however, time can be an unsettling entity that not only casts a cloud of uncertainty upon tomorrow, but functions to unhinge your mind from reality.
Some can gather before a starry nightfall with their closest pals and reflect on the bittersweet high school days with pleasure, but it becomes a very bizarre thing when time seems to have passed all too quickly and entirely outwitted your conceptions of the experience of growing up. Time, in a sense, becomes a sickness of the mind and you can’t help but feel deceived to know that the present is actually happening and that you are no longer trying to color within the lines or gain hold of that wonderful diploma you worked four angsty years to get. You are now fully fledged into the madness that is adulthood, or just on the brink of it. The past scurried by, the now is illusory and the future is opaque with fear and the only thing you are left to gather from it all is that time has, most definitely, become your arch nemesis.
What’s important to keep in mind is that the tick of the clock is inevitable. Why spend your time wishing life wouldn’t pass you by when you could work toward awakening your mindset into something that is present, living, feeling and seizing? We all have those memories that seem quite literally like one of yesterday’s phenomena, or those moments or periods of time that are so palpable and vivid in your thought bubbles that it’s hard to grasp their passing. You can still feel that good burn of adolescence in your chest when you knew you were never going to be that young or the smell of the rainfall on that day you got too drenched but didn’t care. Whatever it may be, the living reality of those moments are gone now. If you are cautious, however, they don’t have to be too far. Try to place yourself at a comfortable distance from them so that you can cherish them, but not so much that the present is devalued. After all, today is tomorrow’s past and if you place too much importance on what things used to be and feel like, it will poison how you perceive your future.
At some point we will each be off to the races in this speedy world as a one-person-show trying to fend for ourselves. This can be just as dazzling an experience as those tender memories you hold so close, but only if you let it be. Don’t ever forget that what you make out of your life each and every day will never be as good if your head is still stuck in the haze. Don’t let your mind trick and belittle you. Your journey as a human being is ongoing so try to remain an active mind. After all, only you can alter your attitude toward the clean slate that each new day brings you. You are growing up and you always will be, so enter tomorrow calm, confident and collected and don’t forget to conquer that clock.