I believe in enjoying life.

When I was younger, I wanted to grow up. I thought that all my problems would float away and life would be amazing. As I got older I realized this was not the case at all. If anything, problems got bigger, and the world became scarier. As I am reading this I feel like I want to go back to being young. It was so comfortable back then, such a warm, cozy place. It was such a predictable and safe world. Things changed though. And with time I realized more and more about the importance of enjoying life. I can never go back into the past. What I can do is live life to its fullest now. If I want to go back into my past currently, then there is a good chance that my future self will want to go back into my present self. I will never be able to go back into time, so I will just have to use all of the time I have right now instead.

I know that as I am approaching the end of my life, I will look back and reflect on myself. I will remember all the things I did. My achievements. My journeys. My happiest moments, and even my failures. When I look back at myself at the end of my life, I want to feel content with all of the things I have done. Life is short and it should not be wasted. I will get out of my comfort zone. I will try new things. I will focus on the things that make me happy. I will make sure to take life slow and enjoy every minute of it.

When I said that when I was younger I thought that all my problems would go away, I think that one of the reasons I thought this was because of my role models. All the people who I looked up to were older than me. I am the youngest in my family. My mom, my dad, and my brother are all role models to me and they are all older than me. They all could do things I could not and I felt it was just not fair. When I went to the playground with my brother and we raced I was always slower, when we played board games I always lost, when I had to go to bed he got to stay up late. My mom was smarter than I was, and my dad was bigger and stronger than me. These things were all obvious contributors to me wanting to get older. But if I dig a little deeper the main reason for wanting to grow up was different. At that stage of my life, if anything went wrong, I cried about it. When my ice cream fell of my cone I had a tantrum. However when the ice cream fell of the cone for my parents or brother, they simply had an “It is what it is” kind of attitude. They picked it up threw it away and moved on. My parents and brother never cried. They made everything look so much easier. This gave me the illusion that when you get older everything would get better. It took me until I got older to realize that they could simply control their emotions better. That their life was actually harder and more difficult. That I was wrong. And that it is better to take life slowly and enjoy it. This I believe.