Starting April 6, for the next 30 days, I'm writing a brief essay every day and posting it to my Medium account in an effort to get off social media and focus on doing something good for me, both personally and professionally. To read my last essay, click here.

In the beginning of 2020, I took a self-imposed break.

I was tired, and burnt out. I was figuring out a lot of things in my life: relationships, mental and physical health, my career goals. I kept telling myself, Man, if only things could just kind of stop for a while, and I had a good chunk of time to myself to really sit down and think things through.

Turns out, that's exactly what happened. I went home in March of 2020 like many students did, sleeping in my childhood bed, unsure of how the world would unfold. From a caring-about-my-fellow-human-beings perspective, I was distraught; from a somewhat selfish and greedy perspective, though, I had exactly what I wanted.

And yet, I set out a schedule I didn't follow, promised projects I didn't deliver on, and spent a good chunk of that newfound time sad about all of the freedoms I was missing out on, the little things of being a then-21-year-old that I enjoyed.

Living in an apartment, staying up late talking with roommates, shopping for groceries and cooking, working hard in the gym with teammates from the ultimate team. These were the everyday parts of life that I took for granted.

These are the things that make us humans.

I was always someone who defined myself and my self-worth by my different ventures and side hustles, not by a paycheck or a good grade. Yet when I had all the time in the world, it forced me to sit down and look in the mirror. It made me admit to myself how important those little things are.

I think a lot of people can relate to the uncertainty and doubt that crept in at the beginning of the quarantine period, whether they're a constant rule-breaker or lifetime rule-follower. And I think a lot of people came to appreciate how time is life's most valuable resource as I did.

We oftentimes think we need for the world to slow down, maybe even stop for a while, but when that somehow did happen, many of us languished, feeling like hypocrites. Yes, this pandemic has invoked trauma among millions, as real horror and greed bubbling up to the surface. We cannot ignore that basic fact. But it has forced me to think about how I would've spent so much of my newfound "free" time if I had the ability to freeze everything in my life.

There's a saying a friend sent to me recently: Be where your feet are. When you're stressed, when you're working hard, it's hard to escape the desire to flee. But I think I see all of that time doing the little things as our world's most valuable resource. Focusing less on over-arching goals and desires and more on putting one foot in front of the other makes the journey all the more worthwhile.

You can follow along with my 30-day writing project right here on Medium, as well as follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my weekly newsletter on Substack here.