New Year: Myth or Reality?

The Earth takes 365 days (rotations on itself) to complete an orbit around the Sun. We call it a year. The point that we use to measure the end and start of this cycle is arbitrary.

Different cultures across the ages have used different dates to signal the start of a new year.

So there is nothing based on physical reality that makes a “New Year” date special. But there is a socio-cultural reality.

In particular, there is an important and very ancient idea, shared by most cultures, and deeply ingrained in the current ones, of “annual circular time”.

That is, that the end of each year (however we define it) marks the end of something, and the start of a new year is a “new beginning”. And so the circle repeats, year after year.

Some cultures studied by anthropologists, archaeologists and historians, go as far as thinking in terms of just one year repeating over and over, at which end all is destroyed, and afterward, it all starts anew.

Chaotic festivities have been celebrated for ages across cultures to mark the “destruction” of the old year. Little remains of those nowadays in the way of high alcohol consumpion, overeating, frenzy partying, and fireworks, for example. Modest “chaos”...

This “destruction of the old” and a “new beginning” open the possibility for a new way of doing things. “This year will be different”. This in turn begs the question “What must be changed? What should be different?”

In many cultures nowadays, the answer to these questions take the form of “New Year Resolutions”. Commitments we make to ourselves to do some important things differently during the new annual cycle. Or do a new thing.

While some people embrace wholeheartedly this practice, riding the wave of the general “new beginning feeling” to get motivation for improving their lives in some desired aspects, others are taken aback by the social pressure to make goals and commitments for the upcoming year.

Both attitudes are right, each with good foundations, I think.

On one hand, any reason that motivates us to commit to healthy practices and goals, and gives us a clear timeframe for achieving those, can be very useful and much welcome in our lives.

On the other hand, we might not take the change of the year as such an important event. Our main timeframe might be days, weeks or months, instead of a year.

We might decide to change something at any time, like a captain that corrects the direction when the ship is drifting apart from its route.

What’s your favorite approach?

• “New Year, new beginning” and “New Year Resolutions”?
  
• Or skipping the New Year Resolutions and going for incremental changes when you feel the need?