Anna – Catherine Keung ~ Assistant Editor
Recently, I started listening to “Let It Happen” by United Pursuit and it has very beautiful song lyrics of “You’re full of life now / and full of passion / that’s how He made you / just let it happen.”
Regardless of your religious beliefs, I hope you agree that being full of life is a great quality to have. I know in college, it is not always easy to be that way. You may even be wondering, what does it mean to be “full of life?”
For me, to be full of life is to wake up in the morning and look at the pretty trees while on the way to my 9:00 a.m. class instead of wishing I was asleep. To be full of life is to look at the person sitting across the table from me and to realize how magical a friendship is. To be full of life is having the audacity to love things, even if they are not “cool.” To be full of life is to realize that all days matter because life will not last forever. Even though these are way that I live my life to the fullest, there are other ways that you can live your life the way you want.
Before you start to worry about me, I would just like to clarify that I do not sit around contemplating mortality all the time. I do not wake up in the morning and think some morbid thing, like, oh, one day closer to death; but, when I have the chance to tell my family I love them, or when I have the chance to do something I have always wanted to do, you bet I will take advantage of those opportunities.
I always joke with my friends that we are getting so old. It is funny because we are only nineteen, but just ten years ago, I was a child who felt like life was going so slow. Now, every day just seems to fly by!
In a few weeks, I will have completed my first year of college. A year ago, I could not have imagined the friendships, relationships, and opportunities I have experienced at U of L. Some mornings, when I wake up and see the mountains out my window, I can hardly believe I have the life that I do. Even though balancing schoolwork and going to class can get overwhelming, I would not trade where I am for an “easier” life.
I never knew how special a dorm building could become or how close I could get with friends that I have only known for a few months. I will miss the belly laughs I have had in Montgomery, I will miss the meals shared in Westover, I will miss my freshman Westover classes, and I will miss a hundred other little things.
Though I had an awesome experience in high school, everything just seems to get sweeter the older I get, and I cannot wait to see what the next three years hold. As Arthur Rubinstein says, “I have found that when you love life, life will love you back.”
