It is not a new year. It is when, for the sake of record-keeping, we change the date. All of human time is designed to do that.
If we all matter-of-factly change the date each day — “Is today the 3rd?” — and the month every thirty days or so — “Yesterday was February 28th. Is this March 1st or the 29th?” — and we never stop to celebrate that March has arrived (with or without attendant lions) or to reflect on what occurred in February, then why make a fuss about a year?
TRADITION
New years are pagan things. They’re long past having any meaning in a culture that thinks that anything that’s more than twenty minutes old is irrelevant. Or, among more recent generations, that nothing ever happened before they were born when the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
The pause at the end of each calendar year, as opposed to fiscal year or Chinese year or Hebrew year, is increasingly annoying. People cram into one brief period all the things that they should have been doing over the previous seasons: getting together with family, offering gifts because “I saw this and thought you would like it,” wishing for things like peace and love that were actively scorned during fifty earlier weeks, and eating single meals that could feed all of Mali for a decade.
WHERE TIME IS MEANINGLESS
People in areas of conflict where life is uncertain, food is a blessing, and freedom from disease is a miracle don’t care about what day or week or month or year it is. It’s another day to suffer or to have unexpected relief. It’s a day with equal chances of struggle and calm and the unmeasured time between sunshine and darkness.
So is this a new year or just more of the same? Is it merely a record of order and shipment dates and lease terms and football schedules or is it the start of something actually new — a world that finds a way to agree in spite of different perspectives, that doesn’t seek to have more and more when billions of others have less in a lifetime than we acquire in a season, that works to ensure that total strangers survive without thinking their survival diminishes us, and that faces the realities of life on earth now and makes an effort to improve them for the future?
It won’t be a new year until something changes from the old one.
If we all matter-of-factly change the date each day — “Is today the 3rd?” — and the month every thirty days or so — “Yesterday was February 28th. Is this March 1st or the 29th?” — and we never stop to celebrate that March has arrived (with or without attendant lions) or to reflect on what occurred in February, then why make a fuss about a year?
TRADITION
New years are pagan things. They’re long past having any meaning in a culture that thinks that anything that’s more than twenty minutes old is irrelevant. Or, among more recent generations, that nothing ever happened before they were born when the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
The pause at the end of each calendar year, as opposed to fiscal year or Chinese year or Hebrew year, is increasingly annoying. People cram into one brief period all the things that they should have been doing over the previous seasons: getting together with family, offering gifts because “I saw this and thought you would like it,” wishing for things like peace and love that were actively scorned during fifty earlier weeks, and eating single meals that could feed all of Mali for a decade.
WHERE TIME IS MEANINGLESS
People in areas of conflict where life is uncertain, food is a blessing, and freedom from disease is a miracle don’t care about what day or week or month or year it is. It’s another day to suffer or to have unexpected relief. It’s a day with equal chances of struggle and calm and the unmeasured time between sunshine and darkness.
So is this a new year or just more of the same? Is it merely a record of order and shipment dates and lease terms and football schedules or is it the start of something actually new — a world that finds a way to agree in spite of different perspectives, that doesn’t seek to have more and more when billions of others have less in a lifetime than we acquire in a season, that works to ensure that total strangers survive without thinking their survival diminishes us, and that faces the realities of life on earth now and makes an effort to improve them for the future?
It won’t be a new year until something changes from the old one.
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