When I was younger, I thought that my shadow was going to play a much larger role in my life. I remember the sunny days in elementary school when the class would go outside, and we would measure the heights of our shadows. We used to play ‘shadow tag,’ a game much like the usual tag, but with the added rule that someone’s shadow was also ‘it’ (a fun variation, but quite a bit harder to enforce). My shadow was always hanging out with me during the day, and when the lights went out at night, I would imagine that it would go out to find the other shadows in the night. Wherever it went, it always made sure to be back in the morning.
As I grew up, I learned that my shadow held a significant amount of information. I was taught how to use it to calculate the angle of the sun in the sky. I observed how its direction changed as the day wound down. By standing at the same spot every day at the same time, I could use it to see how the Sun’s path moved across the sky with the seasons. It demonstrated how the largest thing in our solar system could enact tiny changes to my life.
Nowadays, I only seem to notice when my shadow gets in my way. I’ll often get up to turn on an extra lamp while I am reading or doing homework because the ceiling fixture is mounted behind where I sit. Sometimes, I have to adjust where I am sitting if my friends want to take a picture but my shadow falls across my face. The days of playing and learning with my shadow seem to be over.
I wonder what it does now when the lights go out.