Upon first analyzing the picture below during our collaborative blog post, I did not know what to make of it. My group and I started off by trying to make out specific things we saw in the picture such as the watch in one of the horseman’s hand and what looks to be a shadow of a person behind the little girl. As I explained in our blog post, I stated that the older woman was reaching for the little girl while Alexis thought that the woman was reaching for the watch. I tied both of our assumptions together with Kazon and Devin stated that the little girl could be a depiction of the older woman. This made me think of how we are oblivious to what is around as children because we have yet to experience what the world has to offer. As we grow older and become wiser through things we have faced in life, we start to wish that we can go back in time and use what we know now to change the past.
One small, but common, example of wanting to go back in time is when people go through the college process. Some of us did not take high school as serious as we should have because of various reasons; my reasoning was thinking that I had so much time before I got to college. I did not really research any colleges before senior year or think much about the type of environment I wanted to be in, let alone what college would best suit what I wanted to do when I grew up. Even the summer before senior year where I could have started my research a little early on, I procrastinated. I was unaware of how long the college process took and how important it was to make sure that the college I attended best suited me. Since neither of my parents went to college, they did not really push me to start with the college process nor were the able to give me much advice. Looking back on this experience, I definitely would have went about the college processes differently in terms of researching earlier and giving myself more time for applications, especially the essay portion. I remember when I was applying for my first choice and I tried to write the essay about a week before the early action application deadline was due. After experiencing writing multiple college level essays, I definitely would have started writing that essay at least a month in advance because I am familiar with the time it takes to perfect an essay.
This example shows how even the smallest experiences can turn into learning experiences and make you think of things you would have done different in the past. As you get older, like the woman in Prince’s Old Lady in the Upper Room, sometimes we hold on to past experiences and look at them through a different lense. Although we are unable to go back and change what we have done, what we can do is raise the new generation and try to prevent them from making the same mistakes we did, no matter how small.
