Slow Down.

I want to slow down.

I want to live slower. I want to see everything I’m supposed to see. I want to enjoy every moment. I want to appreciate every sunset. I want to read late at night and take naps on Sunday afternoons. 

I’ve been running all my life. I’ve been running forever and I’m tired of it. I never lived in the present. My mind was always either regretting the past or wishing for the future to arrive faster. I wanted to grow up faster and faster. When I was ten, I wanted to be fifteen. Now I am fifteen and I wish I was still ten. 

Time is precious and I spend my life wasting it. I spend my life speeding until the only moment I’m running is when I’m running out of time. Now I understand why adults are so morose and bored about everything. They, too, spent their childhood wanting to be older and spent their teenages wanting to be younger. Now they can’t even make a wish anymore.

Time passed and they stopped believing their wishes could happen. They realised that life is a succession of things you cannot control or possess, and as a human, this is maddening. We, humans, want more, constantly. We want everything to be ours. We’re always in need of control, to the point that if we don’t get that control, we lose our mind and start controlling things we should never try to have any control on. 

I want to slow down because turning into the sad, miserable adults around me scares me more than death does. I don’t want to lose interest in everything I love now. I don’t want to become a killjoy because I estimate that life wasn’t kind enough to me. 

I want to slow down because I won’t be offered to live again after this. 

So today I will slow down to see a world that moves faster than my heart beats. I will slow down to live every “today” like yesterday didn’t exist, like tomorrow will not exist.

— Mia B.