Photo: getty
Stop waiting for what's next and start living for what's now.
By Becca Martin — Written on Sep 07, 2018
Life is right now. Life is happening as I write this, as you read it, as you scroll past it on Facebook. This is life. Life isn't some day. Life isn't when you graduate high school or college; life isn’t when you get married and start a family of your own.
Life isn’t when you retire and think that's when you’ll have the time to travel and do everything you missed out on when you were young. Life is every second of every day. Stop waiting for what’s next, start living for what’s now, and learn how to be happy in your life.
While you’re always waiting for the next big thing to happen, you're missing what's right in front of you. You're missing the relationships you could be building and improving on. You're missing the happiness of the hidden treasures in your area that you've overlooked all this time.
You're missing the simple joys of everyday.
Nothing is promised in the future — right now is the time to be with people. Right now is the time to work towards your dreams.
You have a job? So what? So do most people. If that isn’t your dream job, you need to find the time to work toward your dream. That's what nights and weekends are for if you work 9 to 5 Monday through Friday.
I know that doesn’t sound like fun, or maybe you claim you “don’t have the time,” but if you want something bad enough, you'll always make time. It might suck at first — you might want to quit putting in the effort, but if you quit, you're only failing yourself and your dreams.
If there's one thing I can promise you, it's that there'll always be more. After you finish that project that you’ve been diligently working on, there'll be another one. After you pay one bill, there'll always be another one coming. There'll always be new tasks ahead of you, and that's life.
Those things are part of life — that's not something that changes. It’s our mindset about these things that prevent us from being happy. We can’t put our lives and dreams on the back burner just because there'll always be another task ahead.
When you want to succeed, you'll stop at nothing to get there. You'll work hard — you'll stay late and come in early. You'll skip lunch to keep going. When life tries to get in your way, you don’t let it — you work around the obstacles and you push through the barriers.
You'll be successful when you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, as bad as you want to sleep, and as bad as you want to eat.
Don’t let life pass you by only being partly engaged in it. Life is f***ing incredible. There's no other way to put it. You have the freedom to go anywhere your heart desires, you have the possibility to become anyone you want, and you have the opportunity to live out your dreams.
The only thing stopping you is you. Stop waiting for Friday, stop waiting for “tomorrow,” and start living right now.
You'll never be happier until you become happy with the way life is now, or acknowledge that you don’t want to live this way anymore and make the necessary changes. You’re never too old to start living a new dream or change your path.
You might not always be able to put the car in reverse, but you can always change direction for the road ahead.
Becca is a freelance writer currently located in Denver, CO. She likes dogs, brunch and going to bed early. You can keep up with her on Insta.
This article was originally published at Thought Catalog. Reprinted with permission from the author.