people observation #14: some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this

today is a beautiful day. It's 10:00a.m. and almost sixty degrees. I am loving life. Everyone has an extra little skip in their step. It's actually quite cute.

I'm not saying this is all of you guys, but I have already heard complaints...About the weather. Come on folks! The sun is shining. The sky is blue. It's Thursday, and in the world of college that means it's the freakin' weekend baby, I'm about to have me some fun.

What could there possibly be complain about, right?

Take the girl in my 8:00 a.m. class this morning.

[ sidenote: yes, I take 8a.ms. actually, I swear by 8a.ms.
I love waking up with the sunshine and
having a grapefruit and an egg and getting finished
with my days early. Before you judge I encourage
you to try for yourself. Maybe not the grapefruit,
that took getting used to. If my brother is
reading this right now, he's probably cringing.
But 8.ams. Seriously! Scheduling is going on right now.
Do it. Take the leap of faith. I dare you. End sidenote.]

This girl: Maybe she isn't a morning person like me, maybe she's what I call a 'mourning person'. She explained that the weather was "just teasing her" and that it wasn't a funny joke.

Then, I asked the hip gentleman at the coffee place today how he was doing this morning and his response was something along the lines that the weather was just going to be cold next week anyways so why should he get excited?

Really dude? Is that how you want to live your life? Oh, something shitty is just going to happen to me tomorrow so why enjoy today? Oh, my hot coffee is just going to get cold in the next half hour, so why enjoy it now? Oh, I'm just going to go to sleep tonight anyways, so why wake up now? Why should I even freaking live right?
This all reminds me of a section of the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. The book, I said. She's explaining how she has a friend who is never able to live in the moment. They'll go somewhere to visit and her friend will be in awe saying, "wow! this place is beautiful! We need to come back here someday!" and Gilbert takes all of her energy into explaining to her friend "honey, you're here right now! Enjoy it while you're here!"

What I'm saying is to just live in the moment. It's as simple as that.

Our minds remember things because memories are great. I have an incredible one. I can remember every school teacher that every person in my graduating class had from 1st grade to senior year. I can remember getting a pair of roller skates, the plastic-strap kind you don't have to take your shoes off for, when I was three years old and living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I remember the little things people tell me, and I notice all of the quirks. If you introduce yourself to me, I will remember your name. Why? It's not some special superpower. It's because I take the time, and because at the time that memory was made, I was in the moment. I was soaking it all in. I was living.

These times of being a Power Ranger for Halloween, pretending to eat your vegetables but really just spreading them out on your plate, and taking that plunge off the high-dive are to be celebrated. This period of kissing your "boyfriend" on the cheek at the dance as all your friends watched.. and then running away, period of zits the size of a large horsefly, and slamming your door because nobody "gets you" are to be celebrated. These four years of getting rejected and accepted, proud and humiliated, figuring out who we might actually be, the four years of school spirit, team dinners, ..prom? .. are to be celebrated. These 4-or-so years we spend in college, this period of our life traveling, and learning, and falling in love. It is all to be celebrated.

Look, I'm not saying life isn't hard and it's always going to be kittens and rainbows if you live in the moment. Adversity strikes. Hard times define inevitability. What I am saying is don't take one sunny day, and choose to not celebrate it because the next might not be. The fact that tomorrow might fall under winter's trap of gloom and doom is all the more reason to get excited about today.

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die