Made It!


Whew! I was concerned I couldn’t’ do it, but here I am four days into the new year, and I haven’t made a political comment—though I have been tempted.


How about you?

Close your eyes. Sorry. Don’t. I just realized that if you do, you won’t be able to read this. I guess I was “talking in my head,” not realizing that this isn’t a podcast or a lecture, venues that would allow me to say, “Close your ideas, and imagine….” Well, if you could close your eyes while still reading this, then here goes.


New Year?


This was my New Year’s Eve text to my grandchildren: Every day begins a new year. Every day is a first day. Every life constantly renews.


Time as a Dependent Variable; You as the Independent Variable


Science and math classes teach us to place the independent variable on the X-axis and the dependent variable on the Y-axis. In many graphs, time is the independent one. The notion is that its regularity can be used as a marker against which to plot the vicissitudes of the variable. We also learn from those classes that time is itself a variable, dependent upon the unwavering speed of light in a vacuum, gravity, and relative speed: Really fast, near C velocities slow time’s flow in a relative universe; muons, for example, extend their lifetimes as they approach the speed of light in accelerators like that of the Large Hadron Collider. But that’s all relative, just as you wouldn’t age like your relatives if you took a near-light-speed roundtrip to Alpha Centauri to find upon your return that your twin had aged more than you.


And then there are the statements everyone makes to show time’s variability: “I can’t believe it’s been a year since…” “Will this pot of water ever come to a boil?” “It seems like just yesterday when…” “Was that the end of the first quarter (vacation, movie, etc.) already?” Time seems to vary against the background of our memories. desires, and varying attention spans. It appears to vary, also, with our perspectives.


Time as the Arbitrary Independent Variable


Maybe it’s because we are so base-10 oriented that we like to measure our lives in beginnings and endings like December 31 and January 1. Look, for example, at all the big celebrations over the “end of the decade,” the “end of the century,” the “end of the millennium” 24 years ago. Look at the penchant people have to recognize birthdays that end in zero as somehow special: “The Big 4-OHH,” is one, the “Fiftieth Anniversary,” another. We like to round up. And we like to acknowledge some temporal designations as special like that end of the millennium in 2020.


But in truth, there’s really nothing special in New Year’s Eve as the end of something significant that differs from December 17th except that we choose to make it special because of tradition. And the same goes for birthdays that end in zero and the ends of decades, centuries, and millennia. Remember that all centuries that we designate as such “civil” time units are so named in western countries—and by adoption, eastern countries—because they center on the birth of Christ. Thus, we label them either BC, “before Christ,” and AD, “anno domini,” for “in the year of the Lord.” That BC has been by “scientific convention” changed to BCE, for “before the common era,” as a concession to non Christians, and AD changed to CE, for “the common era.” The rebrand supposedly makes time-keeping “objective” and “scientific,” but, in truth, the split between years before Christ’s birth and after that birth still center on Christ’s birth. In essence, it’s a silly change, but it gratifies those who think they have freed themselves from the dictates of religion. In studying the eighteenth century, we label those 100 years as the 1700s. Zeroes, represent units we value, but life outside of human custom recognizes no such beginnings and endings, just as waking up on January 1 isn't really different--save for a hangover--from waking up on the previous day. You were the same person the day before your twentieth--or any other decadal--birthday as you were the day after. 


As you know, the Romans had a different designation for years, one based “on the founding of the city,” or ab urbe condita.  Julius Caesar’s famous death on the Ides of March was not in Roman minds a negative number, not a year “before Christ,” but we label it 44 BC or BCE. The Soviets tried to get everyone onboard for a “beginning” that coincided with 1917 and the Revolution, and other cultures have designations that do not correspond to the Gregorian calendar now commonly used for civil timekeeping. Characters in Rosemary’s Baby raise their glasses to toast the child’s birth as the beginning of “the Year One.”


BCE and CE numbering fails to recognize that we don’t know exactly when Christ was born since Dionysius Exiguus was probably off by four to six years. And the former Julian calendar had to be adjusted in the Gregorian calendar because of imprecision in the measuring of both solar and sidereal years, that is, astronomical measurements used to mark the seasons, specifically Sun angle from the perspective of a revolving tilted planet. Such measurements depend on a variety of definitions and “completions” of cycles, such as the time Earth takes to fully complete a cycle of seasons or a movement between perihelion and aphelion. The math is complex and irrelevant here, but it indicates what I said above, that timekeeping is not the independent variable we pretend it is.


But enough on matters I covered in another blog a few years ago. The focus here is on the significance of a day, every day, a focus on the present and its constantly renewing potential. Today, January 1, 2024, is a first day, for sure. But January 2, tomorrow, will also be a first day. It might seem a trivial matter, but consider that it allows us to break from a past we can never recover to live in a present that is all we really have in the context of an unfulfilled future. Today’s resolutions, typically made in the hope of the long term, are achieved only in constant renewing in the short term.


Now


With that foregoing in mind, I resolve to consider at the beginning of each day one question: What perspective will govern my life in what seems to be an eternal Now which appears to be both variable and invariable?


I recognize that many of my perspectives are hand-me-downs and that others I hold are products of past and contemporary thinkers, from authors and songwriters to psychologists and philosophers, and from cultural icons to gurus of all kinds, including health “authorities” to economists and politicians. In short, I’m my own “melting pot” of others’ thinking and behaving. What I’m challenging myself to do is to consider daily whether or not my perspectives are my own, some other individual’s, or a mix of experience and adoption. And I’m challenging myself to recognize daily how variable time and variable perspective are interdependent in what I consider to be a Self.


The Resolution


I resolve to start each day by asking one question: “What perspectives now govern my thinking and behavior?”