Write

There was a picture of a very old typewriter.  It was black and extremely heavy.  I knew from my long ago past experiences that it took some finger strength to press down the keys to make them strike the actual piece of paper you threaded through the top roller.

The picture made me stop and look.  It revived a very old memory of how hard it was to press down on those keys.  Each key stroke took time and effort.  I thought about how mistakes on a page were not remedied by backspacing or deleting.  It involved an entire process of aligning the error to keystroke it again with a white-coated square of paper between the key and original sheet.  That would, of course, correct only the original sheet and hopefully you didn't have multiple sheets with carbon paper in between.  If that were the case, the corrected errors on those pages would only become blurred letters fitted in-between words and not corrected at all.

But the picture made me stop.  It made me look.  It brought back very old memories of how manual the process of actually typing up a piece used to be.  And underneath the picture was one word.

It said, "Write."

And that struck me also.  How long ago did I ever find the time to type on such an old device, with real paper threaded into the machine, and mistakes that took many minutes to correct?  Using that old machine back when it was the only thing to use, took so much more time and effort than I can even possibly imagine anymore.  Today, I have a laptop with a lighted, floating keyboard and I can speed along with incredible accuracy since there isn't any finger strength or outside materials to correct simple errors.  I can pick up and transport my laptop to any location.  Something that wasn't easily done with the bulky, black machine in the picture.  Should I even mention the spelling and grammatical errors the applications I use now point out while I am still typing?

And yet I can't find time to "Write."  Hmmm.

I guess time is relative to how much I want to spend on what I want to do.  That old picture certainly gave me something to think about.
TT