Thoughts

Time

Planning is one of the most important things you can do, at least for me it is. I am the one that is 15 minutes early and yet is always the most prepared for whatever I'm heading to. It's become such an instinct for me to do this that it annoys me when people don't do the same. Especially when meeting multiple people. It's like you're saying "screw you" to everyone else since you happened to forget about something else that you are doing that day. Even if it is something super important, that just gives you even more of a reason to warn everyone else about it, instead of laying them off. It makes it even worse when you have to refuse to do other things for that day just to go do something and then you can't even do it. It's extremely frustrating... I'm not asking for everyone to be extra prepared like I am. I'm just asking for everyone to look ahead. Oh, and by the way, the activity I was talking about that people bailed on was planned a week in advance.

Wasting time is something that I feel like I don't do a lot. It's just that right now, I feel like I am. It's the summer and all I'm doing is wasting time by playing video games and listening to music. The problem is I can't think of anything that would feel like I'm not wasting my time, except for writing here. The thing is, I only write if I feel inspired, or I feel like being creative, which tends to not happen a lot. I figure that I just have to force myself to deal with not being inspired and continue to write, especially since that will get more attention to my writing. Wasting time in general is weird. Normally, at least for me, I only feel like I'm wasting time in the present. Obviously, the past is out, but when it's the future and I think back on it, I never really recall a time that I felt I was really wasting time unless I'm thinking about a time like this. Wasting time also feels a lot worse than it really is. Like, does it really matter that I didn't find anything to do over the summer? That's kind of the point of the summer. I tried starting gardening, but I realized that I would be planting things too late in the season. Now I sit here, bored in my room, writing to waste the time that should probably be spent sleeping. I'll worry about that later.

Being in the moment changes our perception of a lot of different things. For me, both high school and college were affected by my interpretation of being in the moment. Now that I can think back on it, I spent a lot of time in high school thinking about how people interpreted me or every activity I did while nowadays I can barely remember some of that stuff. I'm still in college, so that clarity hasn't really hit me, but I can still see where it affects me. We always see that the moment we are in won't leave us. That sounds ridiculous, but in the moment it doesn't. Of course, we assume that we are prepared for what's ahead, but usually, most of us focus on what's happening immediately ahead of us instead of the big picture. In high school, I wanted to be a teacher's pet, have perfect grades, be the star in the school play, and everything else like that but now none of that really matters. For example, I strived for 4 years to get the main role in every play my school hosted. I was the main character 3 times and only 1 of them I feel I did really well. More importantly, I cared so much about getting those roles and now I can barely even recall what I did to get those parts. Time is a fickle thing yet we can't really see how things could ever change. I mean, how could they? We're in the here and now, how could anything change so fast? But that seems to be the issue. It's that change we don't expect that hits us the hardest. While preparing for the future is great, we can lose track of this change idea as well. There's nothing we can really do about it except expect it. We shouldn't get carried away with that either though. What's the point of being in the moment if we don't even experience it? One of the most important concepts to understand is that growth is expanded by change. I will end with one of my favorite quotes for you to dwell on, "Change is the only constant."