Another (New) Year

New Year is one of our most curious holidays. Of course it’s a cliché that any new year (or new day or week or month or decade or whatever) is an arbitrary marker of time that designates nothing in relation to the continuum of change that happens above and beyond our perception of that which we can’t perceive. We – and our world – are constantly changing on micro and macro levels, mostly unseen. So we’ve invented time to help us mark our life’s changes. Yes, there is some astrological relation to our notion of time (our planet just completed another revolution around the sun). More to an understanding of our change might be the physical, observable markers – the turning of leaves in fall, the falling snow in winter, the greening grass in spring – our first broken bone, our first sexual encounter, marriage, a child’s birth, a grandchild’s birth, a knee replacement, the death of a parent, a move into a nursing home, the death of a spouse. But of course those would be (and are) personal markers. So we’ve constructed these cultural markers of time (days, weeks, months, years) to help us with a larger cultural, shared understanding of the movement from birth to death. And the year is a moderate, comprehensible unit to contemplate within the infinity from here to there within a life. Although whether “New” is the best adjective to describe it might be questionable. Perhaps “Another” would be more appropriate. As in, “Happy Another Year!”