I have never been able to write longhand as fast as my mind is able to create sentences from my thoughts.  Ever since I can recall I've relied on typing - now called keyboarding with the advent of computer-driven word-processing - to capture my sequential thoughts and creative conclusions, whether writing a letter or a poem.  While my mind races through a muse-generated thought sequence, my fingers race to propel lettered keys to post my message, without hesitation.

So I was amazed to discover that someone near and dear to me and far, far younger than I am, writes all her thoughts, her school assignments, her attempts at literary conventions longhand, laboriously.  For to me that is a labour whereas keyboarding is not.  It flows as swiftly and as readily as my thoughts; almost as though my brain and my mind are creating hard copy of whatever I think.  And, in fact, that's what is happening; my brain sending synoptic messages to my fingers to interpret whatever it is my mind is creating.

I've talked about this to my granddaughter, fully sixty years younger than me.  She, like her coevals, has grown up with computers, knows them intimately, is aware how to handle programs almost instinctively, in a way I will never have comfort and complete mastery over. 

Yet she takes her thoughts and scribes them by hand, on paper.  In composing an essay it will take her hours to bit by bit assemble her thoughts - even when they're flowing as a result of much almost automatic brainwork as she has previously considered and brought to fruition her assembled thoughts - geting them all down on paper until she is finally satisfied she has concluded the process.  And then the editing.

And finally, the ultimate commitment; transcribing what she has written on say, a dozen neatly written pages, onto a word-processing document.  At the conclusion of which she will electronically transmit the finished product directly to the appropriate teacher's online site for him to consider and to grade her efforts.

Why not, I ask her, go directly to word processing?  It is more efficient; faster, by-passing the middle-passage of writing everything down by hand.  Corrections and additions and deletions are a zip.  Finalizing the product is made ever so much easier through electronics. 

But no, despite her comfort with, self-assurance and familiarity with the process, she finds it more relevant to her style to write everything out beforehand, get it all together, and then transcribe.

Confronting me with the mystery of the human mind; habit and resistance to change.