For four years, you speed through what you think is the hardest, most dramatic part of your life, and then before you know it, high school is over. No more worrying about who is going to ask you to prom or how embarrassing your first car is.

Then you spend four (or five or six or twelve) years at college and then it's gone. You're suddenly looking back at all of those finals you stressed over and how terrible boxed wine really is.

And then it happens, before you can blink. You are an adult. I'm not sure when it happens, but I think it's somewhere in between paying your first credit card bill and setting up your retirement plan (barf).

Last night, I attended my first "work" holiday party at one of the other teacher's houses. On a Thursday, aka school night, I brought a dessert and and drank ginger ale. There were three (no, four?) kids crawling around and dropping buffalo chicken dip on the floor. There were no red cups. There was a study to hang your coat. There were no strobe lights. There were h'ordevers. There was no house music being "remixed" by a frat brother. There were women talking about their children getting their licenses. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and I've never felt younger.

I think that "we", meaning college kids, think "we" know it all. I'm not sure why I still consider myself a "college kid", because I am not one. I don't think "we" realize how much more we have to look forward to in life. But we do:

We will learn how to coddle a crying baby and what it means to be a parent one day.
We will learn what it means to care for our parents one day.
We will learn what it means to provide for our family instead of our family providing for us.
We will learn how to be a strong adult when we just want to be a kid.

And none of these things come with a manual. Just like being forced into the seemingly foreign idea called "adulthood", we will be forced into new, sometimes scary, situations for the rest of our lives. 

So, proceed steadily, but surely, because adulthood is happening quickly and we're about to learn a whole lot. 

Remember those resolutions you made twelve months ago? How are they going? You know, we only have a few more weeks until we ring in the new year, and I would be fairly confident to say that 95% of people did NOT complete or keep all of their new years resolutions.

And that's okay.

Neither did I.

Last year, I wrote a blog post called 2014 Wrap Up, where I highlighted twenty things I wanted to accomplish in the year 2014. Out of the 20 things, I did 15 of them. Not bad. Not great. 

And that's okay.

So, why all the hype every year about making these infamous resolutions? We feel pressure to PUT pressure on ourselves to lose that weight or get that job or stop biting our nails or WHATEVER because "resolutions are what we're supposed to do." And maybe a month later, we stop going to the gym or stop applying for the job and start biting our nails again. 

And that's okay. That's human. 

My point is that resolutions, though not always fulfilled, are still GOOD. We still change ourselves for the better, if only for a slight point in time. We start thinking of the potential we can have with the year to come and we know what we want to do with it. Even if we only accomplish one out of twenty things on our "list", at least we accomplished that ONE thing. We did at least ONE thing this year better than last year. 

So think about what those resolutions that might have been forgotten. You still have a few weeks, so can you make it? And when January 1st rolls around, make more resolutions even though you might not accomplish them all because you will be setting the bar high, and I bet that if you work hard enough, you can do at least a FEW pretty awesome things in 2015.