New year almost here — be happy (Dec 31)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
The greatest mass hallucination we experience is that the New Year is actually a perception of substance rather than a figment of our collective imagination. For centuries, people have arranged their lives into years, as though years were boxes into which they could put all their experiences over a particular time and eventually put them on shelves when they were through with them.
We’re hearing, “Oh, 2008 was a rough year,” as though the year itself were responsible for the things that went on while we were observing it and living in it. But in fact, today and tomorrow will be the same, more or less, even though they will be in different years.
If you did not have a clock or a calendar, tomorrow would be unrecognizable from today, unless the sun were shining today and it were raining tomorrow.
We know we can’t make it rain by pointing to the calendar, nor can we make the sun shine. We just know that if we are careful about dividing up the days according to astronomical observations, we can guess when certain things might happen.
We can have a pretty good idea of when to plant crops, for example, and a pretty good idea of when to harvest them.
So having a calendar is useful, as a yardstick is useful when we want to measure distance, but not as accurate.
Years are made memorable by the things that occur within their time frame — but the years themselves do not cause the occurrences.
We make New Year’s resolutions because we know that in general we are responsible for what happens to us and we know that if we want to do better, we have to do our part. But we don’t need a new year to make a resolution.
But I do wish you a very happy New Year, which is as good a reason for having a new year that I can think of.
