Musings of a New Year

Each day is a new day. Not only is there a song about it, but when I was a child my father told me so. 

My father is a wise man so I believed him. What I wasn’t so sure about was what was NEW about a new day.  I wondered whether the trees on the new day were new too.  I used to stare out of my bedroom window wondering whether the cherry plum tree in the corner was there ALL NIGHT or whether the new day came with a new tree. 

I wondered what it was about the new day that made it new because the marker of the new day,time, wasn’t new – it was a continuous continuum. I decided, after much observation, that the tree probably was the same tree each day. 

What I wasn’t so sure about was whether the tree moved an inch or so in the space it stood in to symbolise the new day… the clock marked the passage of time and so, perhaps, as the sun moved around the sky so the tree moved around it’s space - a kind of slow dance, for trees.  I wondered whether, by the time I was really really old (which was probably 10) whether the tree would be in the rose beds place.

Of course, this is impossible to determine because if everything was a slow dance perhaps we were all moving and my window wasn’t in the same place as it was yesterday.  I decided it was all a bit too complicated so accepted every day was a new day, but the with same stuff and not necessarily in the same place.  It was probably my first brush with relativity.

So, we are about to have a New Year. I am not sure what is new about the year or why everyone persistently celebrates it for one night only and only half of that, the ‘old year’ half.

Lots of people are saying ‘lets hope next year is better than this one has been’ – the one we celebrated last year.. I don’t think we celebrate the New Year at all, but the end of the current year.  I am not celebrating the New Year, I am celebrating the end of this year. At the end of someone’s life I think of them, what they have taught me, how they touched me, how I might have touched them, and rejoice, mostly, not that they have died but they lived and I was privilege enough to meet them.  I think I will do the same with this year. What have I done, achieved, failed, learnt, sustained, developed and embraced.

The New Year isn’t a time for new beginnings it is a time to continue, but maybe differently.