New Year's

And so begins a new year. As I was watching the televised festivities last night, I began to wonder about the curious importance we humans place on time, and its unerring march. Personally, I have never put much into the holiday. As a child, it was mostly an excuse to stay up late, and time with family. This feeling hasn't changed. I enjoy watching the ball drop, and as the ball falls, I kiss my husband. I make resolutions, some of which I may actually keep. But beyond that, the holiday has never held any real significance for me.

School may be a part of that attitude. In my mind, the year starts in August. The upcoming return to school is part of the same school year, even if it is a new semester. My next semester also doesn't start for a few weeks yet, so its hard to feel like this is a significant beginning.

To be honest, I don't see the significance in celebrating a new year. Time is time. It marches along at the same pace regardless of how we try to parse it into manageable pieces. People talk about trying to make this year better than their last. But isn't that just a little unreasonable? There is always pressures, always strife in our lives. And should our goals to better ourselves really be so stringently based on a relatively arbitrary measure of time?

Sure, years are physically measurable as our sun whips this small little marble we call home around itself. But, the purpose of this is simply to change the seasons. And for most of us, we no longer hold the change of seasons in the same necessity. Most of us don't plant our food in the spring, or harvest in the fall, or work the fields in between. Winter is not something that must be as stringently prepared for as it was ages ago. Throw on snow tires, unpack the sweaters, and throw an emergency kit into the car.

And yet, this day so arbitrarily chosen still holds a special significance. Rather than focusing on continuously improving ourselves, we do it in these little spurts, energized through January, and maybe even February, but often our goals are long forgotten by the time spring rolls around.

Even I, perhaps out of habit, chart my goals for this upcoming year, with milestone checkpoints at the start of each month to keep me on track. Carefully thought out, I managed to separate things into chunks I think will are realistic. This tends to be the greatest stumbling block for resolutions, too many of us bite off more than we can chew. But it is curious to me why we wait for the new year to begin on these things. Why put it off? If you come up with an idea to better yourself and/or your circumstances, why not seize the moment and start on it right away? Would setting goals to be started on November 1 and culminating them by October 31 not hold the same significance?

Maybe I'm a little biased. My religion follows closely to the Celtic calender, and our New Year's Eve is Samhein (Halloween). So I'm accustomed to looking at things a little differently.

So here I am, following the same curious customs that I'm here wondering the purpose of. I have my goals for the year laid out. And I have strong, realistic goals that can be measured. None of this "I'm going to be more generous" or "I'm going to be a better person" bullshit. I find such goals to be beyond silly. They are so immeasurable, and so subjective as to be impossible to fulfill, or not fulfill, depending on how honest you are with yourself.

And so, let's embark on this silly segment of time we call a new year. May your goals, whatever they may be, and however silly they may be, be achieved, and may obstacles crumble before your path.

Happy New Year.