Approaching another mislocated winter solstice date, this one provided us by the Romans a few thousand years ago along with Christmas, Tax Day April 15 and other blessings, is soon upon us. Yes, New Year’s Day will soon be here, an excuse for a lot of people to get drunk, behave stupidly and more will die than on a normal day. But it’s also a genuine day of new beginnings for many, too, who will set forth into their futures with heightened determination to achieve their goals. New Year’s Day is the traditional day to make positive resolutions about ourselves and our futures, and a few of us will succeed. The rest will forget all that and continue as before.
All the little forest animals, like deer and squid and iguanas, will be oblivious to this human foible of dividing the flow of time into clumps and parcels because those divisions are all illusionary, we do it for the sake of reference mostly, not just for days to party and celebrate. Though the way we act, you’d never know that.
The need for a New Year’s Day is simply the fact that a year is one orbit of the Earth around the Sun and in our ineffable wisdom we humans know that it has to start and end sometime and it’s up to us to say when. So we can get drunk and celebrate the end of another really awful year and gird our loins and other parts for what’s coming down the pike.
Until, of course, we get so many years behind us that it all just fades into The Long Blur. The yearly anniversary of my birth follows soon after the New Year and an odd thing is going on. Before I was grown up I, wanted to be, so I wished for the years to pass to become an adult. Then I wished for them to stop passing so I would stay young, and now I watch with pleasure as they keep passing and I’m still alive and healthy. Isn’t it amazing how perspectives can change with time when you have lots of reference points in the chronological continuum?