24 Hours Left to Live

We’re born in a first-world country. For the most part, the rest of our stories can be predicted. We’ll go through our twelve mandatory years of school, experiencing the ups and downs that come with growing up. It starts with the “Ultimate Snack Trade” when you and your best friends exchange the yummiest snacks of second grade. Then comes the cutest kid in all of the third grade—you’re in LOVE! Sixth-grade graduation rolls around, and you put on your classiest clothes and walk across the stage to shake your teacher’s hand. Fast forward to the ninth grade and you have NO classes with your best friends. Cue the waterworks. Everything after that is pretty standard. You’ll go on to graduate, maybe head off to university, and before you know it, you’ll be working.

I recently watched a Cut video, “100 People Tell Use What They’d Do With 24 Hours Left To Live”. The contestants’ responses varied from paying off their student debts, to eating GOOD food, to confessing their undying love for a special someone. I thought it was incredibly interesting to see the various ways one hundred people would spend their last twenty-four hours alive. It made me realize how many people put off the things they truly want to do with their lives, even though the next day isn’t promised. We go to school, then graduate to our careers, quickly growing old without realizing that this repetition has been ingrained in our minds. Movies like The Matrix propose a theory that humans could be unknowingly trapped inside a simulated reality. These films ridicule the mindless routine our culture is stuck doing. Routine is seductive: we put off our plans of traveling the world or learning to play the guitar, because we believe we have to go to work, or we have to get married and have kids. People often feel compelled to stick within the “norms” and stereotypes that society has created, putting pressure on us to follow fashion, beauty, and lifestyle trends in order to fit in.

As enticing a trip around the world sounds right about now, to break free of the restraints society has bound us with, we must stay practical when it comes to the balance of our routines. Education, for instance, is a major part of our routines, but it is also a stepping stone for everything you grow to face once you leave these ivy walls. With a full year of school ahead of us, it’s important to reflect on our daily routines. By limiting mindless habits, like the morning commute to school or the wait for tacos on Thursdays, we can make our mundane school days more productive and enjoyable. We must pay more attention to what’s going on around us and appreciate more of what we have. By appreciating the small, yet substantial, things we are given, we learn to become more thankful for what we have and recognize when others haven’t been given these same opportunities. Coming to school every day and having access to education and safety is something that we often overlook. We’ve been given the gift of education and, regardless of the seemingly endless hours of homework or hard tests, we must appreciate what we have at our fingertips.

Once we grow to realize all the blessings we have given, as greedy as it seems, we always want more. We want to do this! We want to go there! We, as humans, are born to explore; we want to know more about the unknown. We have an infinite number of questions to ask the world and limited time to do so. We are never promised our next twenty-four hours, so we must strive for more. Don’t push your aspirations aside because it is easier to not work for them. Don’t quit that acting class because of a setback during the first class. Don’t wait until you’re given twenty-four hours left to live before you go off to do the things you’ve dreamt of all your life. The one hundred people in that video took their

blessings for granted, assuming they’d have an infinite supply of twenty-four hours to do the things they had always wanted to do. It is incredibly important to realize that we’re never promised the next day. We’re never guaranteed the time to do the things on our Twenty Four Hours Left To Live list. Do the things that you love. Explore, to find more things you love to do. Fall in love, or don’t. Eat all the best food in the world, or don’t. There are no criteria on how to live life: it’s all up to you. Do whatever is going to make YOUR life amazing. Make every moment count, because you deserve to live your life to its fullest. Go into the 2019–20 school year with a new perspective, a perspective that reminds you to stay appreciative, strive for your goals, and do what you want to do.