time flies

As I'm typing this, I am officially at my 3-month mark of being abroad. I can say with confidence, that I have never felt time pass this way in my entire life. It feels as though I’ve been in London for 6 months yet 2 weeks at the same exact time. Trips and memorable events feel like ages ago yet just yesterday. I look at my friends and cannot believe that 3 months ago I didn’t even know their names. I had a friend visit last month and the one question she asked my one abroad friend and I was if time had gone by fast or slow. We immediately and with vigor responded “FAST”. I have simply never experienced time moving this quickly ever in my life and with my final two weeks being upon me, I feel time slowing to its normal speed. For weeks, it felt as though I was almost in a time warp. The days would feel long but the weeks would feel so short. The months would be over as quickly as they began and my countdown to going home became smaller and smaller without awareness of just how fast things were going. During the hardest of times while abroad, I wished that I could just go home already. Back to the comfort and familiarity of home in my hardest moments. Now though, suddenly I'm 12 days out from my flight back to the U.S., and I would do anything to give myself more time. I simply cannot believe or even fathom that in 12 days, I will be leaving London indefinitely and going back to the life I knew before moving to a new country. My familiar routines will come back and normal life will resume. The funny thing is that when I first arrived in London, the length of time ahead of me seemed like the most daunting thing in the world. But in the absolute blink of an eye, here I am almost to the end. I wish I could go back in time and be the voice of reason to my past self to simply live in the moment and relish in the time remaining. Unfortunately, I can’t go back and do that and while I have no regrets about my experience I do wish I LIVED in the present moment and did not allow myself to daydream or stress about the future. My advice to anyone reading this is when you first begin your study abroad experience, look the duration of your abroad program in the eye and dive head first into it. Take the number of weeks you have and turn it into the number of opportunities you’ll have to experience something new. Don’t view your program as a race to the finish line. In other words, be the tortoise, not the hare.