Something old, something new…

The New Year is coming along at rapid speed. This past week or so has, as I mentioned in my previous post, been a very busy one. We had my room-mate’s parents over on the 22nd, I went to my oldest brother’s fiancée’s parents for the 24th and then my grandmother’s just yesterday. It has been a time of little more than cooking, knitting, eating, talking and charades for me, and though I am sad to see it over, I rejoice at the calm and quiet of an empty flat, the only noises the fans from my over-grown laptop and the complaining mews from Saga, the female one of my cats, as she tries to whine her way into my bedroom on her never-ending quest to destroy everything I own.

Lots of people feel the need to make New Year’s resolutions. If you are such a person, here’s the blog-post for you, written by another blogger who seems to have it more or less down to the essentials. I however, feel no need to make a resolution at 12 am on the 1st of January. I’m the sort of person who makes resolutions when the need comes up, and then rarely keep them, especially if it’s just a promise to myself that concerns no-one but me. And sure it is a nice tradition, and it might be what some people need to get them motivated, but then you can get motivated by anything and champagne and the kiss at midnight are nice traditions too, but a hug and some alcohol-free alternative works.

To me, the curious thing about New Year’s is the date we celebrate on. It’s not midwinter, which would have made sense, since the light starts returning on that very day, nor is it the spring equinox, which would have made sense because it’s the beginning of spring itself, and a time when the night and the day are just as long, and what better season to celebrate the start of the year than spring, when everything is coming back to life and bursting into bloom? Also, New Year’s is right on top of Christmas, and do we really need two celebrations right on top of each other like that?

But that is how we work. We’ve ordered our society after dates that we can count instead of seasons as they change, and right now, that might be just as well, since the global warming is slowly blurring the edges between the seasons, so who knows if we’ll have winter or fall in 10, 20 years from now? Maybe the only way to keep track of the seasons will be by the calendar and the length of the day. Maybe the giving time, and abstract concept, as much importance as we do, is of importance in itself. We have created the system and now our actions is making it a crucial necessity. Just as with birthdays, New Year is a birthday of time itself, and though there is no telling how old time is by any other measure, we celebrate the amount of time it’s been measured by us.

But just as with years, the age of humans has little to do with numbers, and everything to do with experience and development. I’m sure we’ve all met someone who appears to be beyond their years, or as in the case of a certain family member of mine, several years below hers. So the time that has passed in our lives has next to nothing to do with who we are or who we become, only our actions and what we have seen and lived can shape who we are. So forget about your years, or the age of time itself, and focus on what is happening in the world right now, in this age that we live and in our own lives. With this post I wish you all a happy New Year – though I have little faith in such measurement -, and leave you with the words of an old wizard from a well-known book and better known movie still; “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”