According to William Penn, an English Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania, “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”

We’re all born with a ticking clock, but somewhere along the way, it stops feeling like a gift and starts feeling like a deadline.

It’s paradoxical in the sense that we have so much of it, yet so little. It can be so helpful, yet so limiting. But with the right perspective it can become our greatest tool.

A few weeks ago, I turned 18 and the reality of the contradictory nature of time came crashing through my window. Suddenly, all the comforts of blissful childhood would be gone. The terrors of real-world responsibility and the consequences of legally being an adult were now real.

We go through life based on a predetermined timeline that we are all supposed to succumb to: society tells us when to study, when to work, when to marry, when to “succeed”. And if we don’t hit those markers by the expected age, we’re told we’re falling behind. But maybe the problem isn’t how much time we have. Maybe it’s how we’re told to use it.

Time can be spent in an endless amount of ways and can be often wasted in small amounts, doing things that don’t really make a difference. I want to change that. The time to make a difference is now. The time for change is now. The time for everything is now.

We have graduated high school, moved on, yet feel like our life has ended. We lose all our childhood friends to the international web of universities or jobs or internships, dragging away the people we’ve spent every day with for years.

It finally sets in how we have taken it all for granted; we should have made the most of the time we had together. We should have done more. We should have done this. We should have done that.

I was drowning in these negative thoughts for a while, feeling like I had lost my whole life and everything would be serious and boring now. But it took time before I realised what I had to do.

Switch my perspective.

Realise that we have all done so much in our childhoods, all in different ways, in different places.

Although this can be seen as the end of all the fun and naivety and lack of responsibility; I argue differently – for the most part.

This is the start of something new. Something exciting. We have the opportunity to now explore and achieve on our own paths while being able to keep our past relationships with all those people from our childhood.

So, for all of you who are still in high school or middle school (or whatever the terminology is in your country) and this article was not that relatable, read this the day you graduate and hopefully that will change. But for now, you are the richest in the world. You have more of it than anyone else. Time. So enjoy it and make the most of it.

For those of you who are in the same place as I am, I hope you can relate and we all take this step with passion and adventure.