I’m currently sitting in my bed in my apartment and I can’t help but notice how quiet it is. The normalized hustle and bustle of my roommates coming and going, laughing in the living room, and making a mess in the kitchen is woefully nonexistent. As fall quarter comes to an end and all of my friends and coworkers make their way home one by one during finals week, I can’t help but wonder to myself where all of the time went. It seems just yesterday that I was going into a fresh new year at college, and as I sit here pondering, I can’t wrap my mind around when the heat wave turned to chills and rain and me being bundled up in two sweaters under my covers. But, even though the time passing is so strange to me, it also feels strangely familiar in the way that everything always seems to be over before I even experience it, especially these first quarters of every school year.
If there’s one thing about fall quarter at any UC school, it’s that it’s a hectic whirlwind of every emotion and experience ever being crammed into the craziest 10 weeks. Though every quarter contains those 10 weeks, I maintain my belief that fall quarter has something about it that always makes it pass by so quickly. This may be because it comes right after a whole summer of anticipating coming back to college, but nevertheless, it’s always over before I even register that it started. I have this theory that events or times that are highly anticipated always end up passing us by, and I always end up in a cycle of looking to the future instead of enjoying the present.
A common phrase my friends and I will use goes a little something like, “Dude, next quarter is going to be so good, though”. I’ve actually said this multiple times a day for the past week in a kind of sad denial of fall quarter tying up its loose ends with us. I constantly look forward to the next chapter so consistently that by the time it arrives, I am already romanticizing the one that will come next. This is obviously to my own detriment, however, there is something about daydreaming about the future that has always been more attractive to me than living in whatever current timeline I reside in. This is precisely why fall quarter always passes me by, and why I am always overly emotional about it.
For a change, I do feel as though this might be finally coming to an end for me. Writing this out right now is making me so much more aware that I need to adjust my mindset on time. Living in the moment is something that has always been hard for me, but I also think being a product of my generation contributes to my issue with it. Gen Z as a whole tends to portray a mask of “realness” and living in the moment (à la BeReal and carefully curated “photo dumps”) which generally conveys a culture of simply pretending to live in the present. I slowly find myself becoming bored with this kind of social media, for the very simple reason that it happens to exemplify my already-present feeling that every aspect of life is being curated for the future. No hate to BeReal, of course.
And so, as this fall quarter draws to a close, I’m making a pact with myself to put an end to my #1 most used phrase of all time (“Next quarter’s gonna be so great!”) and finally make the quarter I’m living through as good as I romanticize my future to be. Maybe then I’ll finally live the quarter I imagined, and I won’t look up from the beach to see the leaves suddenly changing colors before I’ve even restocked my fall wardrobe. As we enter a new year, I’m holding myself to the fact that winter quarter won’t pass me by the way fall always does.