In my short life, I’ve witnessed a rapid evolution of technology. We went from large, clunky mobile phones with antenna about as long as the main body of the phone was to slim, compact cell phones with hundreds of apps and features for us to use to interact with our world. Everyone has a computer, a camera, a game console, and a phone in their pocket nowadays. The world is at our fingertips, nothing is out of reach.

I believe that I have a unique view in regards to experiencing my own rapid change in perceiving time and space. When I lived in Alaska, it was on a small island called Kodiak, at the time there were about 6,000 residents (the majority being either Coast Guard, fisherman, or military).

Due to being in such a secluded part of the world, we were late in receiving new technology. I was born in 1997, cell phones were already in use around the globe by then as well as CDs and personal computers. But we had none of that. I had never even heard of a cell phone before I moved to the Lower 48. We were still using tapes to play and record music, watched movies on VHS, and my favorite pastime was playing in the mud and climbing trees.

So basically, we were living at least a decade or two in the past. And boy did I learn that quickly when we moved to Massachusetts in 2006. My entire concept of space and time was based off of that island, I don’t remember ever leaving it so I thought it was the entire world. My family left on a ferry to the mainland, and I sat on the deck watching the only place I had ever known disappear.

Then we went by car cross-country from Anchorage, Alaska all the way to Massachusetts. I had never seen a road with more than two lanes, I had never seen an 18-wheeler, flashing billboards and shiny CDs and automatic doors… it was all new. So I pretty much had a two week crash course on the truths of the mainland and the vast amounts of new technology I had to wrap my head around.

My sense of time and space was warped at an alarming rate. My concept space had the most prominent change. I had considered ‘space’ to be the island and the ocean around it. Then my sense of time became scrambled as I was faced with what I saw as a ‘future world.’ I felt like we had jumped through time to the future, but in reality my concept of time had been severely limited on the island. It took time, but I was able to accept a new view on space and time around me.