TIME

Thinking about time pretty much full time these days, as I'm doing the primary information-gathering, cud-chewing, random-note-jotting planning phase of what should ultimately be a set of five tremendously cool books which reduced to their essences are about capital t Time. The Day, The Week, The Month, The Season, The Year. Some of those are real, some are constructs. Even if you go smaller-- to hours and minutes and seconds-- you're still dealing mostly with created temporal constructs rather than reality. And knowing that makes a difference. People tend to think things are real, or even really very absolutely real. But it's not true. Thinking about time, and how little of it is real (only the day is real and it's a moving target for most of the people in the world, and the year is real but not perfectly real, just mostly.) leads to wondering what else is really real. Borders. They're real because we believe in them, but pretty much they aren't really real. We just call them real, and act as if they were real, but they're not really real. Only people have bought into the whole notion of borders as real. Birds don't acknowledge borders, and neither do bear or deer or mice, and neither does weather, or clouds of radioactive gases released when nuclear power plants are destroyed by nature, which itself recognizes no fixed borders. Once you start thinking down this road, you encounter lots of other things that aren't really real, but are treated as if they were real for what, I suppose for the sake of our convenience. And that's maybe not really a problem. But I think that realizing how much of what we think is really real is not real at all gives us, perhaps, a greater appreciation of those things that are really real. These words are real, I wrote them, you're reading them. But at the same time, there is a bit of unreality present as well. You can't touch these words, you can't fold them and put them in your pocket, not unless you print them and take the printed page and fold that up and put it in your pocket but even then, there is still a kind of semi-reality going on. The words, the words are actually more real than the printed page-- you can lose the page, give it away, recycle it, burn it-- but you haven't destroyed the words-- just the paper that held an image of the words. The words remain-- floating around in the back of your brain. You can't see them or touch them, but they're there all the same.
And so we regulate our lives by artificial constructs-- time, borders, rules, laws, ordinances-- these things are all helpful, but most of them are not really real. We're not living in some sort of externally imposed Matrix, save the version that we ourselves have created, by ourselves and for our own use, mostly out of thin air, conjured from the ether like a Chinese face changing magician.
We can't abandon all the artificial things that guide the way we live our lives, but knowing that those artificial things aren't real should, I believe, make us appreciate all the more those things that are, in fact, really real.