The end of the year is upon us. In contrast to my younger days, when years plodded along at a snail’s pace, they seem to fly by these days. I have no idea where 2018 went. If it weren’t for my iPhone’s photo organizational skills, I couldn’t sort one day or one week from another one.
Such is life, I guess. Just when you start to figure it all out, there never seems to be enough time to do everything you still want to do. You come up with all these great plans for the year then whoosh! – it’s time to ring in another New Year.
For me, the whole thing is a bit anti-climatic. Facebook’s ruined New Years for me. Well, technically Dick Clark ruined it with his rockin’ New Year’s Eve party years ago. I knew deep down that Dick had rung in the New Year three hours earlier, but with tape delay, the illusion could be kept intact that we were all counting down at the same time.
Not with Facebook. We have friends all over the world now. As I write this, I see photos of 2019 from Australia. Thanks to this cruel world of ours, I will be one of the last to greet 2019. I’d have to go to Hawaii to be any later to the party.
Thankfully, ringing in the New Year crap rings hollow for me. I mean, it’s just the difference of one minute to the next. One minute it’s 11:59 p.m. and then it’s midnight. It’s all a bit random for me. I mean, the Earth just happens to rotate at the speed it does. Every 24 hours (give or take), it takes a full turn around its axis and the sun comes up. Every 365 days (give or take), it’s a full turn around the sun and we call it another year.
If we were on Mars, we’d be celebrating New Years every 1.88 Earth years. If the Earth was on the same orbit, tomorrow would be the start of 1074, not 2019.
I’m not even going to introduce the fact that time is all made up anyway. We live our entire lives letting the clock rule us. We freak out if we’re late or whine if we’re early. We struggle with an extra second or two on our stopwatch and fret about the fact that we wasted another day.
Days. Now there’s a funny one. Did you know that in the colonies, loyal subjects went to bed on Sept. 2 in 1752 and woke up on Sept. 14? During the night, 11 days simply disappeared.
The reason, of course, was that their calendar had gotten so far out of whack that it could no longer be compensated for. Britain had held out against adopting the Gregorian calendar since the Catholics came up with it. They were still using the Julian calendar, which by then, was way out of sync with the rest of the world.
To their credit, they weren’t the last holdouts. That honor goes to Greece, which finally switched their calendar in 1923, having to remove 13 days to catch up with the rest of the world.
Now, imagine if you were a colonial born on Sept. 3, 1750. Two years pass. It’s Sept. 2. Tomorrow’s your birthday. You wake up to find out it’s Sept. 14, not Sept. 3. You missed your birthday because of some wig-headed bigwigs in London.
Confusing enough, right? But how do you go about celebrating the next year? If you wait another 365 days for your birthday to roll around, then you’ll celebrate again on the 14th. But if you go by the date not the year, you’re eating cake and opening presents 11 days earlier.
Stay with me here. Now, let’s all go with the fact that 11 days were just magically wiped out in 1752 to synchronize calendars and let’s all pretend that this time and date thing is as finite as we all think it is.
Is Jan. 1 really tomorrow, or is it 11 days from then (the pre 1752 date).
I’m just having a little sport here. But you can see why the click of a clock from one tick to the next tock doesn’t really do much for me. Time is actually very relative, based on the planet we live on and where we live on this particular planet.
In Sydney, Australia, where my friend is, it’s now 2:15 a.m. It’s 7:15 here. But she’s already on Jan. 1 and I am still on Dec. 31, thanks to the differentiation of time zones (which, is another Earthling made up thing).
Which brings me to this. I used to make New Year’s Resolutions, truly believing that the new year could hold some magical properties. I would resolve to lose weight, be kinder to others, get a better job, be a better whatever… all sorts of things.
These are all good things. But I came to realize that waiting until midnight to strike on an arbitrary day to make changes in my life was really pretty stupid. First, I could make any and all of these changes on any day I really wanted to. Second, well, just read the above because I can’t guarantee that today really is the end of a year and tomorrow is the start of another.
If you still need convincing, remember back to the turn of the 21st century? Exciting stuff! We all gathered to welcome in the year 2000. There was only one problem. the century didn’t actually begin until Jan. 1, 2001. Jan. 1, 2000 was still the 20th century, not the 21st century.
I didn’t fall for the hype back then either. I know when centuries start. But I’m still not sure when a year really starts, outside of our own made up rules based on the arbitrary spin of the Earth and revolution around the sun.
And I won’t even mention the whole conundrum created by the moon and its influences on the tides. Scientists say that our day now is 1.7 milliseconds longer a day a hundred years ago. So when the clock strikes midnight, wait a millisecond or so you don’t look silly.
Me? I am making only two resolutions this year. The first is to stop letting time rule my life. Who cares if I am a couple minutes early or late? It’s all made up anyway. The second is to officially adopt my age on Mars. As of midnight New Years, I am officially 32, thank you!
In the Emerald City, like Cher, turning back time,
(If I could turn back time, If I could find a way… – earworm!!!!)
- Robb