Does it ever hit you just how young we really are?

Do you marvel at how much has transpired in a short 16 years of living on this earth, and
how far we still have left to traverse? To make it easier to grasp, simply reflect upon the last two.
Where you were in the year 2016 and where you are now. Go ahead, stop and think.
You done?
Alright.
Now the last four, all the way back to 2014.
Crazy, huh? How long four years sounds but how it’s hardly anything at all compared to
the most recent sixteen. Tracing back to 2002, a time before the internet was a necessity and
when phones were just for calling and texting. When the world was just beginning to take its first
forays into the twenty-first century, still reeling from the last one and scraping together new
beginnings from the ashes.
Now think about how long we have left.
A long, healthy, and lucky life, on average, entails roughly eight decades of life to live.
Young whippersnappers we are, we’ve only burned up one and a half of those, spending our
time learning about the world around us and growing into the people we are destined to
become, a process that will never end.
They say that time seems like it’s going faster as you age. There’s actually a scientific
reason for it, during childhood everything seems new and exciting, your days are more
memorable when you’re young because they’re all full of firsts. Things stick in your mind more
firmly when they’re new and unfamiliar. The older you get, the more familiar and routine your life
becomes. Sooner or later, the day will come when a year will pass by in what feels like half the
blink of an eye. How many breaths do we have before we take our last, and will we even be
able to stop long enough to count?
We have two more years.
Two years left of our childhood and our youth, two years to gather up all of our pieces
and dive headfirst into adulthood. Two short years to really discover who we are and who we
can be within the bounds of society and our desired place in it. Two agonizingly long years left
to wait for the magic number that will grant us freedom from the confines of childhood, and
simultaneously weigh us down with shackles of seemingly endless responsibility.
Oh, to be eighteen.
There are a mere sixteen years to lean on, at the present moment. What will change
between now and eighteen, I don’t know. What changes within each of us that separates us
from the intrinsic foolishness and naivety of sixteen within the span of two years is undiscovered
to me yet, and I’d like to experience that first day of eighteen soon.
Sixteen is strange.
You can choose to be youthful and energetic whenever you wish, because it is still close
behind you and not yet out of the reach of hindsight. On a dime, however, you can grasp
desperately at the weak seedling of maturity you have nurtured within you for who knows how
long, and act the part of an adult with none of the demands and responsibilities that typically
come with such a title. It is the freedom of childhood and the newfound sensibility that comes
with adulthood
 Years upon years, decades upon decades from now, the filter of hindsight will skew
these words, and the knowledge unforeseen in my youth will taint all of the present of the future,
as it always has and always will.The past is a haze, the present is my home, and the future is
shrouded in dense clouds of uncertainty.
One day at a time, I will clear the fog.