By the time you’re done reading this article, you will have spent three minutes of your life reading this opinion piece. For the rest of your life, if anyone asks you what you were doing on precisely this day at precisely this time, you were reading this article. That is how you spent those seconds. Now they’re fixed. Forever. That is about 0.0000071% of your life owned forever by my writing.

Time is valuable and time is limited. As high schoolers, we’ve often been told that we have our lives ahead of us. In many ways, this is true. However, looking at it another way, the average student has already lived 20% of their life.

That’s a fifth of our lives. Gone. No takebacks, no refunds. However you spent those seconds is etched that way in history forever.

So, we should live each day like it’s the most important day of our lives, right? Make the most of every fleeting second because we’ll only live each once?

Or, we could just… not. We could dread the seemingly endless cycle of school day after school day, frittering the days away with small talk or screens, just trying to pass the time and get through the school year.

I don’t know about you, but living a meaningful and purposeful life sounds far better to me than wasting it with mindless time-fillers.

But it’s so easy to say that, and so much harder to actually live that way. Because wasting time is easy. It’s so much easier to just sit around. To turn on a screen. But, come the next day, the next week, the next year, will you be proud of how you spent those precious minutes? Or will you have regrets?

All too often, people at the ends of their lives have lists of things they wish they had done when they were younger, while they still had the chance. They wish they could turn back time to prioritize the things that truly mattered, whether that’s their family, their education, or their happiness.

Sadly, we can’t turn back time. But we can change our pasts.

Picture yourself a few years or decades from now. It feels like high school was just yesterday. Since then, you’ve had some pretty great successes. But you’ve also had a lot of — too many — days where it was a struggle to keep going. Some of it wasn’t your fault, but a lot of it was. You wish you’d made better choices while you still could.

Now turn back the clock. You’re living that time right now. You have those opportunities right now. Every action you take today establishes your legacy.

Stressful, right? Intimidating? Or maybe what you’re thinking is that I’m overreacting. “I’ll lock in tomorrow,” you might be saying. “But today, I’ve earned a break. Stuff’s hard right now.” Sure. Sometimes. Taking breaks is fine, in moderation.

But the deadly trap in this is that every day you say this, it becomes easier to say it again. And again. You’re establishing a habit. A habit of prioritizing comfort over purpose, what’s easy over what’s right.

So what’s the key to escape? Intentionality. Every time you overcome your instincts and do what the you in ten years will wish you had done, you set a precedent. It will be that much easier to do that again.

Sure, it’s not going to be easy, especially at first. But the first step is always the hardest, and in ten years, you’ll thank yourself for the choices you made today. When your kids ask what you were like in high school, you can be proud of the person you were because you made intentional choices that mattered.

I’m not going to tell you what you should value. That’s your choice to make. For me, it’s faith, family, friends, service, and education, but for you, it could be anything. What matters is that you know, and that the choices you make reflect these values.

Now, you can absent-mindedly skim this article and move on with your life, but I’m going to ask– no, urge– no, beg you to let something you read here change even just one thing you do today. This is your cue. Right now. Here is your jolt to start living intentionally. You only live today once. The time to start is right… now.

Don’t let fear or societal pressure get in the way of making choices that count. As Mark Twain said, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.”

If every day of your life was one second, it would end in just one school day. It’s almost third period. So what are you going to do today?