20 Day Challenge #14

This is prompt #2: this I believe. I think this was originally intended to be sort of like a short essay, but this is what it turned into instead. I don't really like this one, but it's what I wrote for the prompt so it's going up. I started this with a particular intent but it just rambled a bit and didn't quite make the point I thought I was going to make in the first place.

This I believe.
This is all we have,
every second, every minute, every hour,
ticking down to the end.
No more.
The things we fill our lives with don't matter then.
It's easy to put aside the hard things,
every long shot, every practice, every pipe dream,
easy to fill our lives with wasted time.
Every second, every minute, every hour,
ticking away with the click of the keyboard,
with the office jobs we hate,
with the tasks we never really wanted to do.
Time means nothing until it's running out.
We waste our youths on what our parents want for us
(or running away from what they want for us)
and by the time we figure out what we really want
the best parts have passed us by.
Things always get put off for the future,
but the future starts now,
and the longer we wait the harder it gets,
and the future never comes;
we just find ourselves in the present again.
There's nothing that will make us happier
by putting it off.
But we're too scared to take the chance.
Every second, every minute, every hour,
slipping into days.
Into years.
And our heads are still buried in the sand,
so we can't see it slide down the hourglass,
can't see the things we missed
while we whittled away the minutes,
shaped our lives into something different than what we imagined.
In the end, we're all we have to show for ourselves,
and we don't always like what we see.
Maybe, if we had just done things differently -
but we didn't.
And if we had another chance,
we'd do it just the same.
This I believe.