Arbitrary Constructs

Day 80: The New Year has come 'round...or has it? The equivalent of "New Year's Day" is celebrated on widely disparate days by different cultures depending on their calendars which, after all, are social constructs in and of themselves. Time is an artificial construct as far as its measurement goes, and again, not all cultures regard it in the same manner as we do. We have created devices for determining time (or rather, duration), scientifically ticking off the increments with atomic regularity, but anyone waiting for a bus in the rain can confirm that some minutes are substantially longer than others. Time is relative, in more ways than Albert Einstein was able to quantify. A month in a child's life is an eternity; an octogenarian remarks on how quickly it passed. Perhaps that is what Salvador Dali was intending to suggest with his limp watches in "The Persistence of Memory," that time, the flexible, distorted rigor by which the bulk of us manage our lives and attempt to govern the lives of others, is not as fixed as we wish to make it.