For my favorite college class I had to give a motivational speech. here was mine


Life goes by so fast


I remember the singular moment in which I realized how true this was. It was my first day of freshman year in high school. At the end of my history class, my teacher Ms. Abdalla told me one thing “You’ll learn a lot in high school but just make sure you appreciate this time, these 4 years will go just like that **Snap***


I knew there was a little truth to what she was saying but only after my senior year was over did I realize how right she was. My 4 years of high school felt like just a couple of months. The days were long but the years were short. As I’m halfway through my 3rd year of college I'm reminded of this fact once again. I can vividly remember moving into my dorm excited to decorate it and to rush to the communal bathrooms to see if it really was as dirty as people said it was. As most of you guys are 4th years with just one semester left….. I’m sure you can relate to this feeling.


Life goes by fast, but how can you act upon this? 1 thing: slow down and appreciate the little things


We’ve all heard the saying appreciate the little things, it's as cliche as a saying can be. But just because it’s cliche doesn’t make it any less true. As many of you may know, we live in an era where we’ve never had more access to information at the tips of our fingers and our attention span has never been lower. I personally can’t even go 30 mins without a mindless swipe on Instagram just because this habit is so ingrained in my life. But what’s the consequence of this?


I think by being so caught up in zombie scrolling we can miss the life that goes around us. But what really is life? In an oversimplification, I’ll say life is composed of big moments and little moments. The big, crazy moments most people have no trouble appreciating, but it’s the little things that people take for granted. Things like receiving a call from your parents, cooking a simple meal, or just going on a long, calming drive. The unfortunate thing about these little things we tend to only appreciate them once they're gone.


For example, one day I was dropping my little brother off at high school, the same high school I went to, and as I stared at my old school I had a wave of nostalgia enter my memory. I thought back to some of my most memorable moments and what I missed the most. While a good amount of these memories were grand, crazy things, a lot were also little routine things. One in particular really had me drift off in a smile: lunch. In high school,  lunch was just… well lunch. 12pm-12:30pm we ate our food and i got to talk to my friends but then we proceeded with our day. But as I looked back at my time in high school lunch stayed with me. It was one thing that was guaranteed to happen every single day and it was so fun. Every school day I got to eat with my friends, and we clowned each other and laughed so hard we were getting an ab workout and the heaviness of grades, tests, and homework was lifted just for 30 mins. Childish, pure fun. 

I think the worst part of missing lunch was that I never knew it was over. Just one day near the end of senior year a little thing called Coronavirus came along and I never knew that my last time sitting at in brown round table at high school laughing with all my closest friends would be the last time ever. I never took the time to appreciate lunch in the moment, only until it was gone. 

I think a quote from the Office’s Andy Bernard really sums this feeling up for me, “I wish there was a way to know you're in 'the good old days', before you've actually left them.”


I don’t say this to give you some existential crisis about cherishing every single moment worrying that this may be the last time having lunch with your friends or any other moment. 


I’m telling you this because we do not appreciate normal enough. 

When shit hits the fan, whether that be a stuffy nose health scare, injury, or worse, all we’re doing is BEGGING for things to go back to exactly how they were. We tell ourselves we’d be the happiest people in the world! 


Well, Right now we’re back to that “normal.” 


So let’s take a moment each day to slow down and appreciate the little things, because one day… you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.