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The New Year is not really a new year
By Carl Heintze
There's really no such thing as a new year. That is to say, a year or The Year is an arbitrary division of time man has invented--with a little help from whoever makes the universe work.
It actually is the amount of time it takes our planet--give or take a few minutes or hours--to go around the sun once. Thus, the year is an earthly device. The year on Mercury would be a lot shorter--and a lot hotter since it is closer to the sun--and the year on Pluto would be a whole lot longer and a great deal colder.
If you'll bear with my brief physics lesson a little longer, the earthly year is different than it might be on other planets for another reason. The Earth is tilted on its axis in relation to the sun. No one knows why this is so. Just take my word for it that it is fairly unique to our planet.
That makes it possible to have seasons. At certain times of the year, we get more exposure to the sun than at others, unless, of course, we live near the equator. If the earth were perpendicular on its axis instead of being tilted, we wouldn't have seasons. Well, unless we moved north or south to vary the climate in which we were living.
We sort of do this already, of course. Some New Yorkers go to Florida in the winter and to Maine in the summer--but I am getting off my subject.
I raise the issue of The Year to complain about the fact that we like to believe that we start off a new year on January 1. For time and date keeping purposes, of course, we do. And for property and income taxes, for making resolutions, for keeping diaries and for having parties.
A lot of us congregate on Dec. 31 in Times Square in New York to watch a lighted ball drop earthward exactly at midnight. That means the old year is over and the new one has begun. And for some strange reason all the folks in Times Square seem to think this is a wonderful reason to celebrate. They yell, throw confetti, blow horns and carry on well into the so-called New Year.
I suppose it is as good a reason as any for a party, although frankly I could never see much to cheer about in getting a year older. And I gradually have come to believe celebrating the New Year is pretty futile.
Because--as I have been trying to say--it's not really a new year. Since time is a continuum, without end or beginning, even though the ball has dropped, the trumpet has sounded and the old guy with the long white robe and the scythe has come along, there really isn't any difference between Dec. 31 and Jan. 1, no matter what year it is.
I suppose one could say, as the guy with the scythe, the Grim Reaper, does that death brings an end to all this, but it's also an axiom of physics that nothing in the universe is ever destroyed. It just takes a different form. So even though in time we may turn to ashes and/or dust, we're still around and still prisoners of time.
And, if we are on earth, as most of us most surely will be for eons to come, presumably, we will still be tied to the coming and going of years. We won't have conquered time in any meaningful fashion.
We have contended with this conundrum for some centuries, usually trying to resolve it through religion. Eternity is, after all, an invention of religion. Paradise is a conception. We have yet to prove it beyond doubt. And we really have not abolished time.
So, I maintain, we have not found any real reason to celebrate a new year because there isn't any. Our division of time into years, and then into months, days, hours and minutes, is just a way of making it easier for us to pass through time.
It's hard to be part of a continuum, a place without either a start or a stop, so we have invented them. We have decided, having invented the year, that things in the New Year will be better than they were in the old, that by pretending we are starting all over again we have given ourselves a chance to do better. Since I am a sort of existentialist--a believer in the maxim that we only know what we experience and even that without much certainty--I am suggesting that it doesn't really do a lot of good to think you're starting over on Dec. 31.
The things that dogged you that day probably are going to be yapping at your heels on the first day of January.
But I don't suppose that's going to stop you from celebrating year after year anyway.
So Happy New Year, whether it is or not.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times. A collection of his essays can be found at http://www.doitright.com/carl/essays. He can be reached at feodorh@juno.com.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
