Three years ago when I arrived at the University, I knew exactly how everything was going to unfold. Play by play. My future was planned – I was going to take advantage of every opportunity and not simply let life pass me by. I came here on a full ride and then some. I was here to compete for The University of Alabama Forensics Team. I was going to win a national championship for a historic program and leave a legacy. I was going to run for SGA. I was going to be known and for all the right reasons.

Well. Speech didn’t work out. Freshman year, first semester wasn’t how I planned. I didn’t take advantage of my year like I thought I would. As an 18-year-old, I was lost. But it all changed my second semester. It came out of nowhere. It rounded the corner and took my breath away. Night and day was the comparison to the two terms of my freshman year. Everything began going right. Following my first semester, I didn’t question the success and good fortune I had found. And with that came the lack of comprehension and duty I should have developed when faced with remarkably good odds.

As I progressed and achieved more and more, I never failed to accomplish the what – the bottom line, the end goal. I found myself with a great deal of intensity and drive. My eyes were laser focused on the next mountain to climb, and never once did I sit back to appreciate the view. I was achieving at unprecedented rates, but was I happy? I had the what, but where was my why?

It’s pretty foolish to simply sit back and paint a picture of a broken-hearted boy who was an uber success. He was at the pinnacle of leadership, had perfect grades and had a strong circle of friends. But now I reflect, the University, if you don’t have a serious epiphany about the ubiquitous, common circumstances under which you find yourself, you’ll end up like me. We must get over this compulsively obsessive nature of who is greek and who is not – who supports the Machine and who does not. Who is in this honor society or the next – who is running for this position or that. For once, applaud your peer’s accomplishments. For once, be grateful you have individuals around you that are bright and challenge you to become a better person.

I think it is funny that for the majority of our young lives we are encouraged to have our s–t all figured out. This, I think, is a lie and facade with which we become entranced – the ill-wrought, yet effervescent principle that we must have our trajectories figured out upon arrival. 

Don’t have it all figured out, because when you do – or when you think you do – you become complacent. You become complacent when you bask in the rays of success and think nothing will ever stop you. But let me tell you, complacency is a death sentence. We are all mortal; we are all beatable.  We have our flaws, but those are what makes us who we are. All I’m issuing is a simple, fair warning: don’t get wrapped up in the future or what could be. Heed this and live for the moment.

So many of us live for our phone screens – for who is saying what, only being conscious of what’s happening on social media, or what isn’t. This, my friends, makes us just that: minutely conscious, limited by the few inches that our phones measure. Take a look up. Realize that across the table, there is something vastly more special, more important than anything that could possibly be happening elsewhere. Because that’s the important thing.

My fellow students, we have reached a tipping point. See I’m not asking for the last dance – I’m asking for the first. The first in a new direction. Something very special can still be foraged in the embers of ambition and ill-conceived destinies. All I can say to myself and to you dear reader is that it’s certainly not too late. 

This is not so much of a second chance as it is a new opportunity to take the reigns on the important things – the things that pass you by every day, but you’re too blinded by your routine to notice at all, the things that made you who you are, the things that you only realized were so important until you grew up.

My breath was taken away second semester, and all of me doesn’t want it back. I just want a new beginning. I’m fighting for the important thing once again.

Branden Greenberg is a senior majoring in political science. He serves as the Vice President of Student Affairs for the Student Government Association.