Arrive. Get slapped by a doctor and with a name. You can’t take back either. (Technically you can, but it costs money to change your name unless you are a woman who gets married. Go figure.)

Sleep and poop. A lot. Cry occasionally. Have way too many pictures taken of you during the first 12 months of your existence. Decades later, there will be spaces of months and years where no photographs exist. (Unless you are a selfie-addict and post constantly to Instagram and Facebook. Meh.)

Go from liquids to solids. This applies to both the foods you consume and the consistency of your poop. This will flip-flop in the future when you eat some bad sushi or go to Mexico and discover Montezuma’s revenge.

Make sounds. Discover sounds. One set of them will eventually lead to actual words and sentences. The others will get louder and more colorful. If you’re a boy, those sounds will serve as bonding material with other boys. If you’re a girl, you will pretend that those sounds never exit from your body and never occur publicly.

Crawl and then walk. Bump into things. Fly off the sofa and land on your head. Eat crayons and arbitrary items that fascinate you. The more arbitrary, the higher the chance you will end up in the emergency ward to mitigate the damage. Note to teenagers: overconsumption of alcohol will potentially have the same effect with more dire consequences.

Assert your personality. Depending on your parents and your environment, this will be something you will do for the rest of your life unless it’s spanked out of you. Conforming to others’ ideals and standards is a slow method of killing your soul.

Learn and study. Forget about the books. You will learn and study for the rest of your life and chances are you will fail at some or many things. The more you fail, the more you tried. You have also exponentially increased your chances at success by taking chances. Take as many as you can.

Work. There’s going to be a lot of that in life and most of it is not going to be any fun unless you take calculated risks and occasionally make spirit-moving or life-altering decisions. See above.

Money will always be an issue. No matter how much or little you have, it will somehow always be on your mind. Don’t let it own you.

You might get married and possibly have children. Maybe you will fly solo. There are no guarantees.

Moral of the story: don’t take anything for granted and be grateful for what you have. Because after all is said and done, we will all suffer the same fate:

The end.