“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,” Matthew Broderick?s character Ferris Bueller from the 1986 film, Ferris Bueller?s Day Off said. The class of 2013 only has five more months left of high school.

In four years I did more than I ever could have imagined; my life has been full of unexpected turns some good and some bad. Both have brought me to where I am now and made me into who I am; for that I am thankful.

Four years never went by so fast for me and yet so much has happened in those years. In four more years or so I will fully be on the path to adulthood, entering a new stage in my life.

In those four years, I?ve gone to foreign lands, filmed in Hollywood, seen our nation?s capital, lead as a captain of the football team and became an Eagle Scout. Along with my accomplishments, I have had my setbacks, failures and disappointments but the way I see it, these do not define me.

Our success comes from how we react to our struggles, how we overcome and strive toward accomplishing our goals.

However, life should not be spent just contemplating both future and past but keeping focus on the present. As of now there is still work to be done, we must finish strong before we go on to our future.

Right now, as I return to school from winter break, I plan to start a new workout routine, make short films, write new ideas for possible screenplays and maybe learn how to play a new instrument.

No more Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT), no more college applications and no more resume building; now it is time to wait and hope. I plan to do more than wait in these final months. I plan to make the most of my final days in high school and appreciate the present. For in a days time everything could change.

The challenges of high school have now come and passed yet this is only the beginning. A new world awaits the class of 2013 and in a broader sense our generation. Our generation has seen the dawn of a new century, the attacks on 9/11 and two wars, yet we are left to wonder what lies before us.

There is much work and responsibility that lies before our generation, challenges and expectations to face. We may be the generation that cures, cancer, discovers a new energy source or even steps foot on Mars. From the moment we receive our diplomas we step foot on a new stage of life, a new horizon.

According to President Ronald Reagan ?Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we?ve ever known.?

For more opinions, read the Jan. 11 column, COLUMN: Finding peace through God’s will.