Published January 23, 2013
People have always told me my whole life, enjoy these years, these are the best years of your life. I remember sitting on the floor one day with my best friend crying over a multitude of things gone wrong, teenage turmoil’s and calamities, and thinking yeah right! And it wasn’t until recently with college applications knocking at my door and the ‘real world’ just around the corner that I began to question, perhaps they weren’t lying after all.
I’ve been asked this question recently too many times to count and enough times to make my brain throb, ‘what do you plan on doing for the rest of your life?’. The rest of my life! I get asked this question and this over whelming peter pan feeling sweeps over me, I don’t ever want to grow up. I don’t ever want to lose this feeling I have right now, this feeling of endless possibility, the feeling that I am god and that one day I may change the world. Perhaps I won’t, perhaps I’ll fail, it’s most likely I won’t achieve all my dreams but at this moment in time I have the power to try. And that is the best feeling in the world!
So when people ask me what I want to do with the rest of my life I tell them. I want to travel, I want to see as much of this world as I can fit into my small insignificant little life and I want to love and cherish every moment of it. I want to go to college and study something I love and am passionate about not something that will lead me towards a steady job in the future; my future in which I have to worry of that sort of thing is too far away to affect my now and my here. I want to have my opinions and voice them, I want to stand up for what I believe in, fight for it and never stop. I want to fall in love, and fall out of it a much times as I can until one day I’ll find a love that cannot be fallen out of. I want to laugh, laugh so hard that it feels like my ribs might crack and I want to cry like it’s the end of the world. I want to explore, to dream, to discover.
I don’t ever want to look back and feel, I wish I’d done that or I wish I’d told them that when I had the chance. Too often opportunity only comes knocking once and if you don’t seize it with all you have and every amount of strength you possess you may lose it forever. I don’t ever want to wake up one morning like so many before me with that ‘what if’ feeling, that feeling is what destroys people. That’s why I feel it is so important to live now, ‘these year’ they talk about are indeed the best we’re going to get. But not only that, they control what will happen to us when they end. When life gets serious and we have to inevitably leave Neverland, will we be happy with the life we’ve lived or will we be crippled with regret?
So in these few years ahead of me, I am going to do everything. Yes, everything! I am going to go to college, I am going to sail away from the safe harbour and catch the trade winds in my sail. This is important, vital even! To jump out of one’s comfort zone now before getting trapped in it forever, forever living a merely mediocre life. I don’t want that for me, I don’t want that for anyone. I am going to travel, I am going to go fruit picking in Australia, I am going to walk along times square in New York and allow myself be immersed in the lights of the city that never sleeps and stay awake as long as I can with it. I am going to move out of my parents’ home and struggle, but in a good way. The way that makes me feel alive. I am going to volunteer abroad and help someone, help everyone I can. I am going to look into the eyes of the people I love every time like it will be the last time and do all within my power to never take them for granted, to never take anyone for granted even when they’re driving me crazy. These are my dreams, what I feel is important. Yours may differ, but that does not make them any less vital to fulfil or at least try your very hardest too.
Because a day will come when my wings will sag, my sail will falter, my heart will lose its vest and my mind will not allow me feel as invictus as I once did when I was young. I will have a husband to be faithful to, children of my own to watch as they live in their own Neverland’s, their own little world full of endless possibilities. I will have responsibilities and duties, people I can’t let down and I will have bills to pay. This is the only chance I’ve got, the only chance any of us have to make something great with the time we’ve been given, something memorable, something worth it.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than the things you did, so don’t leave anything out. This your life, my life, our life and it is ending one moment at a time.
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
140,581 Literary Works • 673,530 Reviews
Hey, Day here to review.
Honestly, I agree completely with Justine. This was amazing. It's simply wonderful. I love how you're completely open, honest and human throughout the whole article, and how eloquently you've put across your thoughts. If everybody thought like you, what a wonderful place the world would be. This essay of yours is well and truly capable of inspiring people to live life to its fullest, and not leave a single thing undone, for fear that they'll regret not doing it later; it's even inspired me to stop procrastinating and seriously review, and unlike Justine, I shall do the nitpicking here
Content wise, this is absolutely brilliant. I could write a whole review on how wonderful this essay was and use all sorts of fancy language and say the same thing in different words over and over again, but that would give you a big head and waste both of our time. You can never go wrong, writing on a topic like this with such an emphatic speech. That said, I do feel you could improve your sentence structure and possibly the grammar and choice of words in a few places. I'm going to quote a few lines from your essay, and my changes will be in bold.
Just a few small changes that, believe it or not, do affect the flow of the essay and make it easier to read; grammatical or other changes really jump out at the reader and disrupt the flow you've tried to build up, so try to avoid these small blunders.
You could perhaps change this a little; the use of the word question over there seemed a little out of place. You could instead, say, I began to question my reasoning or, perhaps, I began to wonder; you'd need to question something or else use and intransitive verb.
Again, tiny things that really can make a difference (or I'm just too much of a Grammar Nazi to let them slide
This sentence seems cramped to me. Perhaps breaking it up into two separate sentences or adding a semicolon would help.
Again, this sentence seems too long and a little confusing. The wording isn't very clear, and sort o disrupts the flow because the reader will have to stop for a minute and figure out what you meant.
Overall, other than a few places where you do need to go over the essay once more and proofread, this is wonderful. It's open, honest, nearly carefree and just... amazing. All you need to do here is proofread once, really; don't worry about anything else.
Hope this helped~
Day
Formatting fail.
Wow, first of all, way to be open and honest!
I still feel that way sometimes...especially on nights when I just want to be a little kid and forget responsibilities for a while.
As a freshman who is beginning her second semester of college, I can totally relate. It's crazy that people think high school is the best time of our life, because once you get to college, you see just how petty and simple everything was. I realize that it is scary to think about the future...and it is super annoying to be asked about the freaking rest of our lives when we don't even have the next six months fully planned. I experienced that in high school and even now, in college.
I liked that you mentioned the Peter Pan feeling. You are actually the third person to bring that up in the past month...must be catching.
I very much appreciate your attitude about accomplishing great things in the next few years. That tone was excellent for the essay because it showed your determination to do more than just gain a degree that no one will really care much about in twenty years.
Overall, excellent job. I'm sure there is some proof-reading to be done, but I would rather focus on the content rather than the nitty gritties at the moment.
Justine94