Happy New Year!
Happy New Year!
Everywhere I look today that is what I see. “Happy New Year!” “2020 will be better!” “2020 a new year and a new decade!” “I resolve to have a great year!” “2019 is blurry and in my past and 2020 is crystal clear in the future!” (See what I did there) “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” and for all my friends from the South “Happy New Year(s)!”
As a kid and now a “somewhat” adult I have always found New Year’s interesting. Why do we put so much stock in the changing of a 24-hour period that end one year and begins another? Many times I hear people, throughout the month of December, talk about how bad this year was and they are SO ready for the next year. It was almost as if they were just sitting around waiting for the calendar to turn. We then make resolutions that we plan on keeping in our lives to make them better the following year, only to see 80% of them fail by mid-February (another 10% fail by mid-March just to depress you a little more).
I recently had a conversation with a friend who said he was SO READY for 2020 to be here due to the amount of sickness, death, and accidents in 2019. I understand this with the health issues, doctors’ appointments, co-pays, and surgeries I have had this past year. In fact, my New Year’s Resolution has been “no more doctors’ appointments in 2020”, but just found out I have 2 follow up appointments in January! FAILED ALREADY! Who is to say that I won’t have MORE health issues in 2020? Who is to say that my friend won’t know people who die or have accidents in 2020 just like 2019? Chances are he will! Why do we rely so much on a date, a number, a month, a year to bring us comfort, hope, and a rejuvenation of vision? In fact, many people stayed up last night just to make sure the new year actually happened and that they could see it firsthand! They even had a really big party to usher it in and now woke up in 2020 in the middle of the day (already missing the first morning of 2020) with a headache and are a couple hundred dollars poorer. I hope saving money or living a healthier lifestyle in 2020 wasn’t one of those new resolutions! FAILED!
I honestly can’t remember what I was doing last New Year’s Eve. Probably watched some TV, tried to eat half-way healthy, returned a few Happy New Year’s texts to random friends, played a board game or two with the kids, and went to bed about 9 pm. Much like this year. I know boring, but there is a reason for that I will get to in a moment. 2020 was also a new decade—EVEN BIGGER! Of course I have NO CLUE what I was doing when 2010 rolled in (probably the same thing as last night and the year before). I think the only decade I remember was 2000 because the fear of God had been put into us that the computer apocalypse was going to happen and shut down a free market economy and we would all wake up trading chickens and goats. (Thank God that didn’t happen or we wouldn’t have ever had Bit Coin.) Plus, I was partying like it was 1999 finally thanks to Prince. However, my computer still worked and that 1999 party was really no different from the one in 1997 or 1996—except I wore a red beret and got a little attitude and walked in through the out door (Prince joke for my 1980s friends).
We really have an obsession with measuring things in America. 24 hours in a day, 12 months, 365 days in a year (except 2020 just to really mess you up--Freaking Leap Years), 10 years in a decade, 100 years in a century, 1000 years in a millennium (that is all I know without Googling answers so I will stop). Then we measure miles, money, grades, etc. We use numbers, percent’s, and anything else that will compute in an excel spread sheet. Our military measures things by using a different system and then science and foreign countries have an obsession with the metric system (personally I just think to make themselves feel superior). We count and measure everything. Happy New Year! It’s Wednesday, January 1, 2020!
Everything has a beginning and an end and we compute the cost every step of the way. I am in no way saying this is bad, but it is so interesting to me to compare this to other countries, especially the non-Anglo ones, who have a future and eternal view on so many parts of life that can’t be separated. It is like there is another chapter that really doesn’t have a starting or stopping place. It is kind of like if you could write their lives down, their story doesn’t use paragraphs, capital letters to start a sentence, no punctuation, or spaces. Poor grammar I know! It would drive us Americans nuts! It would be unreadable to us! Why? Because it can’t be measured or separated, put into nice neat little compartments that we can get our minds around. We just love that. But what if you never had a New Years and the date, day, or time never mattered? What if you had an eternal view of life and lived into it now, but saw it as never ending!
What if you lived your life with no end in sight and every day was just a continuation of the last? Not like the old movie Groundhog Day, but more linear without a starting place or ending place. Generations before you brought you to this point and you will take others farther down the road as well. If time didn’t cause you to do some things and wait to do others, but instead you just did them because they needed to be done (remember time doesn’t exist). Sure, we have daylight and nighttime, we have seasons, and all of us are getting older. But what if that didn’t have anything to do with time or measuring but rather simply represented the natural cycles for us to sleep and work (or play), or allows a natural cycle for the earth to reset itself for future crops, balance, and growth, and a natural life cycles that comes with getting older and dying so new birth can take place (kind of like seasons).
I know it is hard to get your mind around because time and measuring things is all we know. If you ever go to a church service in a foreign country, you will understand. There is no beginning point or end point. It just is. When the people are there we begin and when they leave we end. I met one guy wearing a watch that had not worked in 10 years. I asked him why he was wearing it and he said because Americans that come visit think it makes me look more important. If you don’t believe me go to a funeral of someone in a foreign country compared to America—you might be there for days (except you will be the only one that know that). They will just stay until they are done grieving and then go back to living. It is bazaar and seems very unorganized to a temporal type A American! How about a foreign wedding? Will these things ever end; I have things to do! Just going to dinner in a foreign country can feel like an all-day adventure (except there is not a measurement of how long a dinner should take or not take to these people it is just a time of community and relationship building that happens to be taking place with food). And we get peeved if our waiter takes too long to bring our FREE bread that we feel we deserve!
I know we have to measure time otherwise no one who works for/with me would show up tomorrow and blame it on this post. (“Yeah, but you said there was NO time so I didn’t know when to come in!”) I want to know how much money I need to retire and what I need to do to get there. I get it, we have to measure things and I am in no way bashing your New Year or your resolutions (that you probably won’t keep). But I do want to challenge you and myself to look at 2020 differently. If you have to measure something, measure 2020 as the year you began to see every cycle of a sunset and sunrise as important and refused to wait for a glass ball to drop in an over crowed city with an over paid host to REALLY start living. But instead every moment of the day was important to live to the fullest not knowing what was going to happen in the next sunrise and sunset.
I will get sick this year and I have resolved I will see a doctor. Hopefully, no surgeries, but I am really okay if I do because it is going to happen in life. People I love will get sick, get hurt and die at some point (it will happen to my friend as well, who was lamenting about this). It may be during the 4th full moon (just making crap up now) or on the 3rd cycle of winter (more made up crap to prove a point) but I know it will happen to you and me. I can stop living and wait for a clean start or I can live through it and keep going. I am choosing to do the second (see I am already measuring again). I hope you will join me so that every sunrise will count from now until eternity. Happy New Year’s (sort of).