By John Agujetas (Grade 10 – Luna)
Art by Theone Tiu (Grade 10 – Rizal)
“The optics for the familiar blur into obscurity, but the transition to the exotic passes by in the blink of an eye”. Time as a function of awareness and attention has faded into irrelevancy, and the days bleed into weeks— into months like ink splattered onto canvas. That is what it feels like being a learner, nothing but a march to obscurity. The days are ticking by, but aside from different numbers, what has changed?
Putting 17 months of time into words would normally be a verbose endeavor, but surprisingly, it’s now an upward struggle to get ink on paper and a challenge to find things to talk about. A shift in life’s core values draws out dramatic upheaval within a person’s value system after all. Sports, extracurricular competitions, and even simple pleasures like a casual jaunt around with good company were all ripped from us to be then substituted with digital screens in various sizes, all forms of tactile movement translated to the characters on a keyboard and social interaction reduced to pixels on a screen.
Some bemoan the loss of opportunity, many complain about “missing out” and the pathetic, use it as a justification for just about everything bad that has occurred within the said time frame. For the exceptional however, this is just another breeze in the wind, their howls ringing loud and clear through the whistle of the wind and ringing clear through the air. This is nothing if another foe to face with a different face, another scale to weigh a person’s worth in the face of adversity.
If you take anything away from this, let it be the value of adversity in the equation of character.