As 2016 came to an end, I noticed a similar phrase being effortlessly thrown around: “I can’t wait for 2016 to be over.” Even though I understand that 2016 may not have been the best year, what year is perfect? In what world does everything work out the way it was previously conceived?

As Americans, we have a habit of always wanting something more. We have this constant desire to speed up life. When school starts each fall, we count down the days until winter break. After we get back from winter break, we whine about wanting spring break. Then, summer break. This never-ending cycle leaves us captive on an emotional roller coaster. We refuse to accept the present as our lives.

We are eager to escape the pains of growing up. The issue is that our desires are fogging our judgements, preventing us from seeing the rainbows hidden beneath the heavy blankets of clouds that we have created.  

We aren’t allowing ourselves to enjoy life and all that it has to offer. I’m not saying that life is easy. Life is a big pile of messy, unmatched socks in a bin: unforgiving and confusing. But when you look down upon this ominous pile, are you supposed to give up and hope that in time they will sort themselves out? No. You are supposed to find the matches, the missing puzzle pieces.

If you do it with your favorite playlist blasting in the background: it’s not so bad. That’s how we need to approach life. We can’t sit back and accept that things aren’t going well, anxiously waiting until that moment in our lives is over. We need to take charge of our lives with a our own personalized version of the “mood booster” playlist from Spotify playing in the depths of our ears.

You can’t have rainbows without rain. Will you let a few bumps in the road prevent you from reaching your final destination? No. Maneuver your way around the fallen tree branch, and honk at the distracted driver swerving to your right.

What I’m trying to say is that we can’t give bad things that much power over our lives. We are so afraid to face our daily troubles that we resort to secluding ourselves from the outside world, wishing for time to pass before our eyes. We can’t approach each day in a lazy haze, counting down the minutes till it’s over. We need to stop sleeping through our lives.

We can’t sit and wait for high school to be over. We need to make it what we want it to be. We have the power. If we are unhappy with our lives, we need to change them, instead of hide from them.

Life is a process and we only have one. The little things don’t seem so bad if we approach them with an open mind and some cool tunes. We wouldn’t be doing ourselves justice if we didn’t try and let life pass us by.

So, now it’s 2017. We are all going to be one year older and one year wiser. We may have struggled and gone through strife, but we are all still here, and we are here for a reason. We owe it to ourselves to focus on the now, as opposed to the future. Don’t let this be the year that you can’t wait to be over.