Only Numbers

Time exists only through numbers. Consider the course of the day. The sun rises and it sets. The moon appears and disappears. These are cycles we witness, just as you inhale and exhale, just as you eat when you are hungry. It is not time but an event, a cycle. Even a life ending in death is an event, an inevitable circumstance. It is another cycle. Yet, an event is not necessarily time passing. There is nothing linear about the repetition of certain events-that is until you count them. Once counted, they cannot stray from the undeniable path of logic to continue onward: 1 to 2, 2 to 3 etc, etc. The cycle is forgotten. It is no longer an event but a number. There are 7 days in a week, 24 hours in a day. How could you explain the length of a week without numbers?
For some reason, we want to know how these cycles are numbered. We want to know numbers which represent our understanding of everyday events. Desperately, we seek to understand our life through any means, so we label, so we number. Even in history, we see the mistakes, the repetition, but attach a worthless timeline to it, a year. What is our fascination with time and the numbers attached to it? Are we so desperate to explain and understand that we need to label it? All day we move with the numbers. We understand, that to be efficient, we must obey their symbols. Forced by time, we must base our actions upon numbers, by a date, a time. We must hurry to class by a series of 3 to 4 numbers separated by a colon. Most students know that in a certain number of weeks or days or perhaps hours, an assignment is due. Carefully weighed and measured, we determine how long it will take. Whether starting a few days in advance or pulling an all-nighter, we make adjustments and decide.
The time is watched. It is carefully monitored. Like a danger approaching us, we wait in apprehension, we wait for the imaginary numbers of time. Eventually, the numbers begin to worry us. Only numbers. Numbers which nag, which whine, which vie for your attention. Coercive numbers which demand millions of slaves to wait in traffic for hours, which demand workers to be on time or be fired, which demand us to wait in a long lines and wonder how much better we could be spending the five, ten, twenty minutes waiting. This is time, the self-inflicted way in which humanity continues to simultaneously organize itself and create chaos. (Andrew Sippie)