With two million things on my mind, I burst into my room, completely frazzled, in a wild search. I shuffle through drawers of colored paper, loose stickers from my sticker collecting phase and a mouse-shaped pencil sharpener. Anyone who knows me is aware that I have a strange attachment to my signature purple and pink mechanical pencil. Ironically enough, my “lucky” pencil always seems to be lost.

After completely dismantling the contents of my room, I look through the last drawer. Lo and behold, there is my lucky pencil, exactly where I put it to prevent myself from losing it. Just as I am about to close the drawer, I catch a glimpse of an envelope. Strangely, it is addressed to me in my own handwriting. It reads:

Dear Yvonne,

Congratulations on making it to high school! I hope that you are taking many honors and AP classes and are involved in many clubs. Most of all, I want you to follow your passion in writing. However, I really hope you still spend time with your friends and family, as they are what matter most.

-Yvonne

I spot the date and see that I had written this letter to myself for an eighth grade English assignment. I sadly realize that I may have lost some wisdom in the past two or three years. Currently, I hold school above all else in my life. The things in my life “that matter most”, my friends and family, do not even have a slot in my busy schedule.

Although I know that thinking about the future is very important, I cannot always be so concerned with it, as living too much in the future means that I am not living at all in the present. In five years, I might feel that I wasted the prime of my life, a regret I do not wish to carry.

I peer up at the clock from my bedroom floor, noticing that I have just spent a whole four minutes contemplating my life. My mind drifts as I think about how I should have been studying, but I quickly pull it back. I grab my lucky pencil, acknowledging that the letter would have most likely faded away into my past, if I had never “lost” my pencil.

I think that maybe my lucky pencil is pretty lucky after all. •