Unreal

Every now and then I remind myself that the structure of a week is completely artificial. Weeks have beginnings, and middles, and ends because we assign those things to them. When you wake up on a Monday morning and you’re not excited about it, the day itself is very similar to the previous day and the next but the meaning and value we assign to the beginning of a week might mean something to you.

One of the most wonderful things about being a person is realising that in many ways these stories and meanings we assign to things are more real than the real things which underlie them. Perhaps one morning you’re sitting by a tree, looking at the sky, thinking about how beautiful living things are. These can be small profound moments when we step away from story and get a little closer to just observing. But there’s something about them which gently pushes us away. We enjoy them for a moment in a very genuine and sincere way but then we quickly move back to the world of meaning and narrative.

I think part of the reason the stories we tell ourselves feel so real, and are so real, is because they are the things we actually connect our behaviour to. Perhaps Monday morning means getting up a little bit earlier to think about the work that needs to be done that day, or to travel to an office. Perhaps it means picking up a difficult task or conversation which was set down on the previous Friday. Perhaps it also means spending a little less time with our family, other halves, children.

Life has been very busy the last few weeks. A combination of family, personal, and work challenges that have left me trying to reassign and use my time as valuably as possible. Friday was no exception and I moved my expectations a little bit, as I realised I have really been missing my Chinese classes. These thoughts and feelings are important as they reminded me that learning this language is something which is important to me, I derive meaning and value from the experience of learning something new and working with teachers to memorise vocabulary, develop my ability to listen and speak et cetera.

I have gone a few days without a Chinese class, cancelling them so I can spend more time working. For some reason this morning I wanted to go ahead with my class and so I messaged my teacher and asked her to be gentle with me as I hadn’t had time to do my homework properly but also missed the experience of having the classes. She told me she understood and we had a revision class together going through vocabulary and material we’ve studied in the past.

I came away feeling pretty positive as I retained much of what we had studied but also could see that there was a proportion that needed to be refreshed to make sure I had the vocabulary properly locked away. It’s often the case when I review collections of 30 words that five or six of them will have faded from my memory. Ironically, this isn’t because they are the least used.

Sometimes the terms I struggle to remember are ones I use very often. I think there’s some sort of mental barrier or boundary where things are flagged, to user technology term, as difficult to remember or challenging and this makes it hard for the brain to establish a sense of confidence around them. For example the character 都 dou, which emphasies the idea of ‘every’ (每天都 here meaning ‘every day’, with an emphasis on ‘every’) is a character I still regularly confuse with 那, na.