Year 13 English Writing
By Jackson Boyd | Posted: Wednesday October 22, 2025
Stop fast-forwarding your life
We are constantly waiting for something, are we not? Whether that be the weekend, the holidays, or even the next huge thing that's supposed to make life magically better. We are regularly living our lives as though happiness is just another place we can reach if we move fast enough. The truth is, while we are sitting waiting for life to begin, it's already left us behind.
Somewhere along the winding road of life, we have been taught that “living in the moment” is a nice idea, like hot yoga, or a sunset, good in theory, but often unrealistic in practice. We scroll apps, looking at photos of people travelling, laughing, and living their best lives, and we get caught thinking, “I'll do that later.” When life begins to slow. When I have more time. But Father Time waits for no man. He won't pause while you check your phone or finish the last house chores. He moves at the same pace for everyone and everything, silently, unrelenting.
The satire of it is, we’re almost always surrounded with reminders to “be present” – the motivational quotes on your water bottle, art on cafe walls, and self help podcasts promising true peace if you breathe deeply enough. However, we seldom stop long enough to listen. Often we are too busy trying to capture the moment to truly live it. Somewhere, someone’s on the peak of a mountain taking dozens of photos for their followers, forgetting to truly live in the present.
I know it's challenging to live in the moment, because I, like many, have done it too. I've caught myself watching a concert through a camera instead of through my own eyes. I've been sitting in conversations thinking about what I will say next instead of actually listening. I've looked forward to many moments so much, holidays, sports games, concerts, that once they finally arrived, they felt somewhat brief. Like they were sand slipping through my fingers, until only a few grains remained – the memories made.
The problem often doesn't lay in the fact that we’re busy. It's that we are distracted. We feel the need to fill all silence with sound, every break with a scroll, every moment of calm with movement. As a society we've forgotten one of the great arts, the art of being present. When was the last time you simply stood in the rain without a rush for cover? When did you last go through a meal without the urge to check your phone? When was the last time you went for a walk, purely to walk, not count your calories or steps. But to simply walk and exist in the world?
Living in the now, however, isn't about completely shutting the future out. It's about the realisation that everything that is to come is forged through moments just like what is happening right now. It's the realisation life doesn't mystically begin once you leave school, or get a job, or even fall in love. It's happening constantly, in the seemingly simple, boring, or mundane moments often overlooked that fill your day.
I stumbled across a quote one day that said, “Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.” That made me feel something. I realised that many of us are doing precisely that. We rush through our weekdays to reach our weekends, through high school to get to university, through our teens to our 20s and 20s to the age of stability. However, if we aren't careful, we’ll reflect and realise we never truly lived any of it, we just completed it.
If we are always chasing what’s next, we can easily miss what’s here. And that's the danger we face, because eventually, what’s next expires. One day, those same moments we rushed through will be the same ones we would give anything to relive. You'll wish that you stayed a minute longer at the sunset, hugged that one person a little longer, or truly listened to their voice. Because one day you'll never hear it again. At the time such moments aren't dramatic or life altering events, but when put together they all fit into the jigsaw puzzle of something truly extraordinary.
Truthfully, the ability to live in the present, like all good things, takes time. It isn't meant to be easy to slow down in a world full of speed. But it starts in the small actions. Putting your phone away for a meal, living a sunset through your own eyes, or even simply listening when someone talks. These changes are simple but are a rebellion to this world of speed.
Everyone yearns for their life to mean something. And this doesn't come from spectacular achievements or perfect experiences. It arises from taking notice. From being there for the small moments. The echoes of laughter through the playground, the way the sun mirrors off the ocean, or the silent satisfaction of waking up for an early morning walk. These moments are the pieces many of us miss in our puzzle of making our lives mean something.
One day, those small moments will be the same ones we hold closest to our hearts, not the ones posted online, but those of when we were truly living in the now.
So maybe, just maybe, it's time for us to stop fast forwarding through life. To stop living for some day and start living for today. Because some day is never a certainty. The world doesn't require us to move faster and faster. It needs us to pay attention. The present is not just that moment between what's been and what's to come. It's the only thing that's ever really ours. It's a gift. And that is why it's called the present.
