I’m writing this as we approach January 1 and as it is every
year, much is being made of the “change” from one year to the next, as if it
means something. Like most folks, I don’t mind an excuse for a party, but it’s
probably worth remembering that calendars aren’t real.
Early on in human history, people observed that nature
follows cycles – among the most obvious of these cycles is the alternation of
daylight and darkness, and since all animals sleep and human being sleep at
night, it was natural to treat each renewal of daylight as a “new day.” Another
easily observed cycle was the apparent waxing and waning of the moon, which
seemed to begin about every 28 days, so along with days people spoke in terms
of months (moons). Finally, in the mostly temperate climates where humans
lived, there was the cycle of the seasons.
These cycles gave us days, months, and years as naturally
occurring phenomena. Then the human mind began to intervene. Cycles have no
real beginning or end – like circles they just keep going round and round, but most
things in human life have beginnings, middles, and ends, and so it was perhaps
natural to see the cycle of the seasons as one of birth (Spring), growth
(Summer), aging (Fall) and death (Winter). But if that is the case, why not
begin the year in April, with the onset of Spring? Well, here another human
feature comes in – call it religion or superstition depending on your bent. Along
with the weather changes of the seasonal cycle, in most latitudes the cycles of
daylight and darkness varied as well, and the “dying” part of the seasonal
cycle, was also the time of year with the least daylight. Early religions
incorporated festivals involving lights to fend off the darkness, and when the
days began to gradually lengthen after the Winter Solstice, the darkness
receded and they felt the world was reborn, so the custom of demarcating one
year from the next in mid-winter was born.
Note that all of this calendaring is the result of human
interpretations of natural phenomena. Now, thousands of years later we treat
these interpretations as if they were facts. Religions set their “new year”
according to their own calendar. The hijri,
the Islamic New Year will occur anywhere from September to December during the
second decade of the 21st Century (another invention – Centuries), rosh hashanah, the Jewish New Year is
generally in September or October, tet,
the Asian New Year occurs in a variation tied to the Winter Solstice, and the
standard or secular New Year is, of course, January 1st. In all
cases, though, the holiday supposedly marks a significant change – different years
have different astrological and astronomical influences, as do different
cycles, etc., and otherwise rational people vary somewhere between full
credence and sheepish uneasiness in their relationship to the changes. Look at
the turn of the millennium a dozen years ago or the supposed end of the Mayan
calendar last week for illustrations of this phenomenon.
So let’s have a party, wish each other a happy “new year,”
and remember to write 2013 on our checks (does anyone write checks any more?),
but let’s not take it too seriously. Things will change, and we’ve set certain
things (e.g. the government, budgets, credit card expirations) up to change in
concert with changing over to a new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar or
whatever, but remember the aphorism “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” (the more things change, the more
they are the same thing). The world in 2013 will consist largely of the effects
of what happened in 2012, 2011, etc., and we would do well to keep working at
what we began in 2012 and not expect any magic to occur when we take down one
calendar and put up another.
Happy 2013.
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