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Article snippet: Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter. Editor Tim Herrera emails readers once a week with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Monday morning. I barely graduated from high school. Whenever I tell someone my life’s “elevator pitch” — you know, your personal narrative in five minutes or less — I always like to talk about how I would regularly ditch my high school precalculus class only to play tennis with the teacher of that class after school. I rarely went to any of my classes, and when I did I was more concerned with gossiping and texting than I was with the day’s lesson. “Thank God for Ds,” my high school American Government teacher joked earlier this month over dinner. I’m borrowing that quip about life’s finish line (that finish line, of course, being death) from her because it’s one of my favorite clichés, and it absolutely rings true. I spent two years after high school getting my Associate degree from a community college while the rest of my friends went onto four-year universities. I finished college a year and a half later than everyone else my age. I was a little self-conscious that I was years older than other interns during and after college. Things seem to have worked out O.K. since then. And now that I have a little more life experience behind me I look back and think: Who cares? As we age, we tend to perceive time as exponentially accelerating; the more time that passes, the more w... Link to the full article to read more