When my girlfriend visited a couple weeks ago, I suddenly became self-conscious of how bland and messy my room looked. Despite it being week six, moving boxes still sat unopened and the decorations I brought lay on the floor untouched. For the record, I think of myself as a clean person. But with my new apartment, I had excused myself because this space felt temporary.
I’m only at Hopkins for a two-year program, and I don’t even know if I will stay in the same apartment next year. Why bother decorating if I’ll just have to take it down in nine months? Or buy and assemble a shelf if I’ll just have to disassemble it and move it out again? I told myself I’d stick it out — wait until I graduate, get a real job and move into a real apartment. Then, I would finally invest in furniture, in decorations and in a life that felt stable and permanent. Yet as I heard myself say it, I realized I had said the same thing as an undergrad.
See, it’s not really about the interior design, it is about the real problem deeply ingrained in my mindset. Too often, I label entire parts of my life as “temporary,” and in doing so, I justify my lack of investment — as if effort only belongs to permanence. I tell myself this is just a short pit stop before the real thing, that I should save my time and energy for later. Yet two years is not some insignificant layover. It is over seven hundred days, over a million minutes in a short, finite life in which I don’t know how many minutes I will get.
This attitude also seeps into how I treat myself. I think of myself as a fluctuating, unstable project still under construction, waiting to be fully finished before it warrants significant investments. As if I need to become some future, perfected version of myself before I have the permission to start living fully. I postpone hobbies, health and relationships, promising I’ll get to them once I’ve completed working on myself and figuring myself out or once I’ve reached some stable plateau. But the reality is I’ll never be a finished piece. I’ll always be working to better myself and continuing to figure out more about myself until the day I die, never to reach that asymptotic ideal I’ve set. If I wait around for that day to come, I’ll never get to live at all.
At its worst, I find this logic coloring my relationships. I treat time and attention as resources only to be invested in people who seem to promise permanent returns. But people aren’t stocks. Affection and attention aren’t portfolios you can optimize for long-term gain. Moreover, so often those passing interactions with those I will never see again are the ones that wander my mind years later. The man I stood in line with at the DMV who made the hour-long wait bearable. The family seated next to mine at the teppanyaki restaurant, whose youngest shared my birthday and decided to celebrate at the same restaurant on the same night. The girl across the street I shared a laugh with as we both watched five consecutive cars roar past the comically large “Stop for Pedestrians” sign we stood underneath.
What’s more, permanence is unpredictable. The ones who most deeply shape our lives are often never the ones we first expect. If I had listened to that voice and stopped making friends at the end of senior year because I knew we were all moving away, I never would have forged some of my most unbreakable bonds.
So I invite you to think about your childhood days. Before meticulously optimized schedules and four year plans and object permanence. Back then, every moment was lived for itself. We didn’t postpone joy or ambitions until after the next milestone — we lived fully in the moment because that was all we knew. And perhaps that was what made childhood so bright. We treated every moment — large or small, fleeting or long-lasting — with a wide-eyed care and reverence.
So tonight, as I hang my decorations and finally click order on the shelf for my bedroom, I make a promise to live life as if every moment counts. Life is precious. Every moment of it. So stop trying to wait for the real chapter to begin and simply live fully in this one.
Jason Chang is a graduate student from Woodbury, Minn. studying Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. His column is a celebration of the quiet moments that linger amid the jumble of our busy lives: moments of stillness, reflection and a space to just exist.
