Living in the Countdown

There is exactly one month until graduation. In numbers, that’s 31 days, four weeks, ten weekend nights, four more Monday morning walks to class and Thursday game nights with my roommates, and one final night before we all part ways from the college town that brought us all together. In one month, the town I’ve spent the last 1,226 days calling home will gradually feel more and more foreign. 

Time is always silently passing, but now graduation has made it abundantly visible. I’m hyperaware of how the normalcy of moments from my college life will soon be defined by their lasts. This heightened awareness of time has invented a new lens to my eyes, adding emotional layers to ordinary moments and making me question whether this is helping to cherish the present or quietly preventing me from fully living in it.

For me, this spiraling pattern of thinking isn't anything new. When something that has become so accustomed to my everyday routine is about to end, every moment becomes laced with anxiety telling me to not take any second for granted. When the end becomes countable, it feels impossible to fully integrate myself into the present without the internal clock in my mind slowly ticking down. Like when my final soccer season of 14 years was coming to a close, all I could think about was my last game, practice, and carpool to the field. For high school graduation, it was the last class period, homework assignment, and walk through the halls with my friends. I even see this fixation in small moments— week-long vacations, short-term jobs, and that one unexpectedly fun elective. Over the last few weeks I’ve also found that this concept of the internal clock is universal to a lot of people, and especially college students who are frantically trying to come to terms with the fact that they’re entering the next chapter of their lives. When I open my phone I’m continually confronted with videos of seniors mourning their college experience prior to graduation. This persistent way of thinking and repetitive focus on every “last” builds the perception that the future has already caught up in real time. But why are we feeling so nostalgic over something that hasn't actually ended yet? The way I see it is that people naturally search for emotional safety nets. Focusing on the anticipation of an end helps to soften the blow, allowing us to process its absence before it fully arrives. 

But in trying so hard to emotionally prepare ourselves for change, we can end up distancing ourselves from the very moments we’re afraid of losing. I noticed this last weekend when camping with my friends. Together, we drove two hours down to the coast, entering acres of woods with no service for miles. Unplugged and present, I was able to distance myself from social media and the constant notifications and reminders pulling my attention towards what is ending. By not being focused on trying to preserve or maximize every waking moment, I saw that the value of an experience didn't derive from its ending, but from the way it mattered in real time. This escape from reality took my mind off of the measurable endings stemming from that glooming graduation date. I sat around the campfire with the people who shaped my college experience, understanding that the anxiety I’ve always held towards different chapters ending was evidence that I found something worth missing in the first place.

So, to answer the question, is this awareness of time allowing us to cherish the present or does it quietly prevent us from fully living in it? I think that both of these can be true at once. We can fully insert ourselves in the moment while also feeling an underlying sadness. It’s bittersweet. We all know change is coming, and this sadness is normal. But there’s also an underlying level of appreciation and excitement. It’s hard for us to accept the inevitable reality that comfort is temporary. However, so is discomfort. The anxiety that comes with the start of something new will soon be looked back on in the same light as all the other things that were hard to say goodbye to. Once time becomes visible, so does the value of the moments we once let pass unnoticed.