What is life? All of your friends hung out together and you weren’t invited. You see that bad grade on the top of your unit test that you studied really hard for. Someone insults you or says something mean to you. Taking a snapshot of these moments is when many of you say, “Life sucks.” But, is this really what life is? Think of your favorite memory as if it were a snapshot or photo. Maybe it’s a picture of you and your friends at the pool. Maybe it’s going to get mint chocolate chip ice cream with your sister. Maybe it’s taking your dog on a walk.
One of my favorite snapshots is a picture of my best friend, her brothers and me from last winter. I remember the moment perfectly. I remember driving to the top of the gigantic hill that we would soon be sledding on. I shook my hand warmers in my pockets so I would stay warm. I looked at my best friend and we hopped out of the car at the top of the hill. We put the sleds on the ground carefully so one of us wouldn’t accidently go down the hill before the other.

“Are you ready?” I asked her for probably the fifth time.

She looked up at me and I could see the tip of her freckled nose and cheeks turning a light pink. She replied smiling, “Ready! On 3! 1, 2, 3!” We flew down the enormous hill of snow. I screamed for my life with this crazy thrill in my stomach. I felt amazing. I didn’t have a single care in the world. All I was thinking about was how much fun I was having. When I was about to reach the bottom of the hill, I saw my best friend had fallen off of her sled, and the second later I did too. We were lying down in the snow together, laughing so hard that we couldn’t move, almost getting hit by another person sledding. We both looked at each other and knew we had to go again.

This snapshot is the one that matters. Life isn’t that snapshot where you don’t feel included, life isn’t that snapshot where you didn’t do so well on that test and life isn’t that snapshot of the nasty tweet someone posted about you. Life is an on-going video. It’s full of all of those snapshots. It’s the events that lead up to that moment and the ones that follow. It’s too easy to focus on a single bad moment and let it define your life or who you are because it hurts. But, in life, instead of letting one single snapshot define us, we should create a collage of happy memories and joyful moments that make us say, “This is my life!”