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Time Is All Yours

By Jérôme Sayeur, Grade 11
I’m going to share some of my experience with something we are all struggling with: time. Time is messed up. We never seem to have nearly enough of it, and it is probably because we are very bad at managing it. Whether it is about school or life in general, we tend to use our time to do less important things first.

Just think about how many times you have gone to bed late because, instead of using study time to do homework, you were watching YouTube videos.
 
Unfortunately, there is no miracle tip to stop doing this. How good you are at managing your time goes with how many times you’ve felt stupid as you were turning in an assignment at 11:59 right on deadline or with how many times you ended up with getting a mere four hours of sleep because of your procrastination. When you wake up the following morning, you generally regret watching TikToks for an hour instead of doing that assignment earlier the night before.
 
If we were given an added two hours every day, most of us probably would not use it for something useful like sleeping in order to have a productive next day. No, we would use it to do something we enjoy, which is not bad, but also isn’t something that would benefit us as much as sleeping or working on a school project.
 
Time is precious. When you are born, without even knowing it, you are given an hourglass with a specific amount of sand in it. That amount could be huge or small, but when you run out of it, you cannot do anything about it. The trick is how to use that time, because no matter what you are doing at any given moment, one by one, the small grains of sand that fall can never be used again. When you run out of sand, there is no way to get it back. I had a very good friend who ran out of sand and only after 15 years. 15 years! How short of a lifetime is that? I am happy to say that she was a very outgoing person. She was friends with everyone and was always making the most of her time, almost as if she knew. I think that was just how she was, and I am glad that she used her time this way, because most people don’t.
 
Now I know that as students, time is tricky. We feel like we have all the time we want, and, fortunately, most of us do. Most of the time we think that everything we wish to do or must do we can do tomorrow. However, sometimes you simply must do it today because tomorrow you’ll want to do something else.
 
So, the takeaway here is that you get to decide what to do with your allotted time, but you are also the one who is going to live with the choices you make, and that I learned from my friend. I did not realize it when she was still here, but she was teaching me a life lesson. You are the one with all the power over what you are doing with your free time. I want you guys to try and enjoy most of your time at school even if it seems like you don’t have a lot of it to spare. Try to do everything you can do because if not now, when?
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