The Days Are Long, But the Years are Short

I have been thinking a lot about this concept lately. I have been reading and rereading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, and she talks about this concept in her book, that the years will go by so fast, but the day to day feels like it drags along.

I think this resonates with me because yesterday, I was in the middle of getting my BA and running around town volunteering on so many campaigns.

Yesterday, I was organizing events at my community college, planting trees, and re-taking statistics.

Yesterday, I was stage managing my high school senior year musical.

Yesterday, I was at middle school graduation.

The days are long, but the years are short.

I look back on these bits of my life, and the day to day, the drama, the friends, the everything, felt big and too much to handle and impossible. The days were long then. I struggled through them.

And now here I am. I am no longer a volunteer on a campaign, or an event planner on a team for my community college, or a stage manager for a musical. I am an adult, with a job in my field. I have responsibilities, I regularly get up before 8am on the weekends, and I have purposely stopped drinking coffee after two in the afternoon.

Some days, I find my days dragging, and I am so overwhelmed that I can hardly think. Those days are long.

Then I remember. The days are long, but the years are short. It will not always be 2016. It will not always be this campaign cycle, this job, this living situation. I have the time to write this post, time to reread the same book four times in a row, time to go to new restaurants and explore the town I grew up in. And I will look back in 5 years and realize that I didn’t live my life. I didn’t live this year.

The years are short. This is my life, and I have to really live it.