Ode to Time ... I mean Us
photo by jayla jones
Ode to Time … I mean us
By fourth year Alexis Kelley
When I was in elementary school, my class walked down the hall to computer class once a week. I remember fitting my feet into one of the square tiles of the floor so that our class line would be perfectly straight, and we would walk as quietly down the hall as we could until we got to the computer lab. Once we arrived, we’d all sit in our seats. I was always next to my cousin (because you know alphabetical order last names just worked out like that) and we would open up this program called Type To Learn.
I remember so vividly learning where to place my fingers on the keys of the keyboard and which button to press when so that I could type out a sentence like “Mary Jane visited an elephant at the zoo.” I would get so frustrated when I couldn’t do it, but so proud when I did complete a level. One year they even put this cover over the keyboards so that we couldn’t look down and find the letter we needed on the keyboard itself. Just little me, blindly hoping to choose the right letter so that I didn’t get points off as I played Type to Learn.
This memory came to me the other day while I was typing. Thankfully, about a decade and a half later, I can now type without frustration and even know where all the keys are without having to look at the keyboard. But the idea got me thinking about all the things I know now that I didn’t know then. It made me think about how time passes by, and I can still remember the person I was, but there’s also this whole new aged version of me who knows things little me never knew.
The time passing doesn’t have to be a really deep thing, it can be something as simple as me typing on this keyboard right now. We tend to think that the big moments of life are what tend to change us, but I think it’s just the culmination of the little ways we learn to react and adapt. The way our minds wrap around time is more personal than we usually think about. Like for me, this past week was one of the longest weeks of my life, but for you maybe it sped by. Or for me, I can remember computer class from elementary school, but you might remember a certain classroom or playground or something like that.
Even as I started typing this piece, I thought it was going to be an ode to time and the way it changes us, but as I've taken a deeper look, I’m realizing we really are the ones that grow. Time has little to do with it. We learn little things that turn into life changing things. We learn life changing things that later might not seem as big. Change needs time, but time is just the backdrop for who we are turning into. The same day I flashback to learning how to type, I can go through my laptop (originally because I need more space) and become nostalgic of all the things I’ve written on this computer as the time passed. The pages of words represent who I was and am becoming. The main point is not time.
The main point is personal. It’s the evolution of us.