Julia wants me to write this.

I have the word “reality” in the title of this blog, but it occurs to me that I look at the concept of what is “real” in a bit of an eccentric way.

Many people say “real”, without thinking, to mean “physically existing.” For example, if I tell you about my friend Julia, and someone asks me “is she real?” they are probably asking me whether she is a person I meet and talk to, not whether there exists a concept that I label “my friend Julia”. Even more extreme is those people who differentiate between something that happened on the internet and something that happened to them in person by saying that the offline event happened “in real life” (or “IRL”).

The more I live, the less I make this distinction. To me, “real” is a term that means that something exists in some way. Love is real. Mercy is real. Curiosity is real. Beauty is real. We perceive these things, and therefore they are real (even if someone else might not perceive them in the same object, or at all.) Yet they are, I might argue, less physical than something that happened on the Internet. And, subjective as they are, they are as real as the concept in my head that is “my friend Julia”. They are also as real as the physical person of Shakespeare, as the latter has long since ceased to physically exist; yet because he lived once and because we collectively have memories of the things he has done, we call him real.

What is the most real of all things? Existence itself. And existence is not only what is physical; it is also our perception. If humour and grief exist, if the colour orange exists, if our own identities exist, then we must admit our perceptions to be part of existence. To me, that makes them real.

So even if my friend Julia turns out to be someone I completely made up for the sake of this example, she is real, because you and I are sharing the perception of a friend named Julia. Moreso if I use her as an example often; if I find this concept to be useful, if I like the idea, if other people start envisioning her in their minds– all of these things will reinforce her importance to me and to anyone else who reads this. And the more important she is, the more we think about her, the more this concept exists strongly and powerfully in our minds, the more this concept becomes real. And then, even if she is not a person physically going around being human, there is a very real “friend named Julia”– that friend just happens to be a concept rather than a physical girl. But is she a real girl? Certainly so, conceptually.

And even if it’s true that I met Julia on the internet rather than in college, she is every bit as real. To think that what happens on the internet has no reality is preposterous. I am, fairly obviously, a human being (did you think this entry was generated by a computer?) and so, I trust, are you. I am saying things and you are reading them. This affects us both. Is that effect imaginary? No, I’d say it’s quite real. However you are reacting to what I’m saying right now is real. (Even if no one reads this, I am imagining a hypothetical reader reacting, and that concept is real, as a concept.) You and I may not know each other from Adam, but just because we are strangers does not make us any less real, and nor does it make our interaction somehow imaginary. I often think that the failure to parse the internet as a real place is what causes a lot of trolling, flames, and other rude internet behaviour: the callous person’s rejoinder is often “lol, this person takes the internet way too seriously”, but why would anyone take human interaction any less than seriously? The word “callous” is carefully chosen here, being the antonym of “sensate”: a callous person has forgotten to sense reality and notice the truth– that there is a real exchange taking place between living human people, and that that is just as serious as the meeting of any two strangers. (Of course, if they think that no interaction between strangers can ever be serious, then they are insensate in a different way.)

So what do I mean when I ask you to “embrace the warm facts of reality”? I mean for you to embrace the warm facts that exist. Whether these come from the world around you, or from interactions between you and others, or from inside of you, or even from the idle fancies of your own mind, I want you to hold them close to yourself and remember how beautiful they are. I want you to bask in all of those things that you find positive and pleasant, to cling to them and never forget how precious they are. I want you to not dismiss anything that makes you happier, however trivial, even if you’ve made it up. I want you to know and care about and spend your precious life thinking about things that fulfil you, and I don’t want you to push any of them aside because you are afraid that they are unimportant, figments of your imagination, or dreams that might not come true. I want you to love what makes you happy, because it is the best way to spend your life.

Oh, and my friend Julia thinks so too.

Wonderful thoughts to sidetrack me from complaints

I have been not so well lately. I have every reason to be in a bad mood: I’m tired, I’m feeling nauseous, my sleep cycle is a wreck, and my seasonal allergies are acting up on top of all that.

But I have cats. I’m not in a bad mood, because every morning I wake up to the two most adorable kittycats ever to roam the earth (okay, so I might be a little biased, but they’re certainly in the running.) I usually have a kitty snuggled up by my head and one on my feet, possibly taking up half the bed, and being so cute at it that I can’t bear to push her aside. And all day long, the cats will follow me around and sit next to me and snuggle with me, and they’ll meow for attention and get underfoot if I’m walking about.

All it takes is my cats. Or– if I’m not at home– a pretty photo from the internet, or an unexpected donut day at work, or seashell windchimes, or a particularly nice shade of green, or anything else that I like. Each of these things is a wonder in itself, a beautiful thing that didn’t have to happen, but because the world is full of beautiful things, it did.

In the past, I would brush these things aside: sure, I got a free donut, but now I have to go do chores, and I’m feeling sick, and these pants are wrinkled so why did I wear them, complain, complain. I would mentally complain to myself about all of the things that weren’t right, thinking that if I focused on the things that were wrong, I could then make them better. And while there was some merit to that thought, focusing so much on all the things that needed to be fixed meant that I never had time to enjoy the things that didn’t need to be fixed.

I would say to myself: well, of course this thing is bothering me; it’s a hindrance, a problem; if it weren’t getting in the way of my enjoying other things, then it wouldn’t be a bother. And then I would feel justified in fretting about the problem until it got fixed, on the theory that anything particularly bad would make me keep on thinking about it. But I forgot to realise the other half: anything particularly good would make me think about it, too. It wouldn’t be an enjoyable thing if it weren’t brightening my day and making me forget about my gripes. It makes every bit as much sense to be distracted by the good things as the bad ones.

So that’s it. Instead of thinking about all the bad things that didn’t have to happen to me, I’m going to think about all the good things that didn’t have to happen– and yet somehow, marvellously, did. I will let those things sidetrack me and take up my attention, because that is what especially good things do. What are the odds that I would have come to exist and be so privileged as to get to see ducks in the pond while I was out today? Yet it happened, and that is nothing short of truly amazing.