As a wise man once said, “So, no one told you life was gonna be this way.”
Now maybe it’s the fact that I just watched “Interstellar” in Mrs. Burton’s physics class, or maybe it’s the weird COVID-19 limbo that we’ve been stuck in since March 2020, but the strange nature of time has been on my mind recently.
My dad would always tell me time was the one word you can’t define without using it in the definition. I thought I cracked the code when I said it’s the past, present, and future, but that apparently was incorrect because those were synonyms for time itself. The more I thought about it, the more frustrated I became with this riddle.
Kasia Ostrowski delivers her valedictorian speech. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
In school we learn a lot about time. Converting from milliseconds to hours, relying on Mrs. Carlucci’s sixth grade mnemonic, Kids Have Dropped Over Dead Converting Metrics, which now that I say it aloud is a little morbid, but it carried me through high school. Even in elementary school there was a preoccupation with the silly little metric that defines our lives. I still remember bringing in 100 Cheerios on the 100th day of school when I was a little kid and watching the countdowns on teachers’ whiteboards more and more intently as summer approached.
I’ve come to realize that time flows quite differently from day to day. Now, most respected scientists will tell you that time is constant. A second is a second no matter how it’s spent, but as a runner I know that’s a complete lie. One minute of planks is an eternity compared to one minute of rest between repeats. Out on the track I often find myself surrounded by clocks as I’m trying to shave off those extra seconds from my record, or I’m relying on my watch to have good pacing. My watch tan is a testament to how much of an anchor time is in my life. Despite how much I try to control my walk through life with my watch, it always manages to get ahead of me. Even seeing the days count down right in front of me couldn’t prepare me for today.
You see, time is funny like that. One moment you’re packing your bags for Nature’s Classroom, barely able to sleep because of the swarm of butterflies in your stomach, and the next you’re up on stage saying goodbye to people you feel like you just met.
Time is cruel. It’s cruel because it is linear and you can never go back no matter how much you beg and plead with the universe; it does not care. You are forced to move forward. You have to trudge through the never-ending meetings, and sprint after the fleeting moments of joy, but they will all slip behind you, eventually entering your past and you will move to the future.
The elephant in the room
Our futures. That’s the elephant in the room, isn’t it? The buzzword we’ve all been hearing a lot this year. The one that I’ve tried my best to hide from, but in the end I guess it caught up to me. Here we are at the gates of whatever lies ahead and there’s no more avoiding it, but once we cross through we don’t have to leave our past behind. While we can’t travel backwards in the flow of time, we have our memories to carry our stories along with us.
I was doing an English project a couple days ago about self-identity. We were asked to find pictures of ourselves throughout the years to reflect on how much we’ve changed and how different identifying features like our clothes and hair styles evolved over time. When we looked at our phones to find those horrid pictures from middle school, we realized something: We all have more pictures of each other than ourselves, and when we leave Bromfield behind us, these images and memories will remain in our wake.
In a few years we’ll all be different people, maybe even unrecognizable to each other, but we’ll each remember our friends the way they are now. Perhaps once Mattwell [Matt Atwell] crosses through those gates, he’ll emerge a Wall Street banker, but in my memories he’ll live on as a debate champion. Marley Ferguson might go on to be a respectable, Nobel-Prize winning astrophysicist, but I’ll remember her as the boisterous girl I met in fifth grade who taught me how to swim so we could go tubing together.
We’ll each guard our own time capsules of each other, framing moments that we as individuals might outgrow, but ones that shaped us into the adults we become.
I think I’ve finally found my answer to my dad’s riddle. Time is a paradox of fast and slow, of repetitive cycles and linear marches, of hellos and goodbyes, and of our memories and our futures. It’s what allowed our paths to cross when they did, and it’s what is pushing us forward in different directions. Time is relentless yet precious, and although our journey together has come to an end, I’m so glad I got to spend my time with all of you. Thank you.
Kasia Ostrowski is valedictorian of the Class of 2021. She delivered this talk at the 142nd graduation exercises of the Bromfield School on June 6, 2021.
