A New Year

I was sitting on a couch on New Year’s Eve, almost New Year’s Day, and wondering: Am I silly to sit around a television and count down with the rest of America while an oversized ball slowly dips into the sparkly, bright letters reading 2009? A few minutes before the countdown, I felt my heart racing and I wondered why. How would this actually change my life? Besides the fact that I would need to change the final digit on the year that I write when I do headers for classes, my life really wouldn’t be that different. The change was merely superficial: It was all about a date.

I guess the central question becomes: What makes a date? More specifically, what do these dates tell us about our lives? Is time no more than an arbitrary denotation that individuals began to use to try to foster organization and stability in a world that has shown itself so often to be so hectic? Time is really a funny thing when you think about it. Our calendar system may differ from that of other nations or societies, yet all of us seem to function just fine. It’s not as though the dates have a static fixed meaning. The meaning only comes from the symbolic and emotional fixations that we have placed on them.

And to be honest, on paper, New Year’s Day doesn’t feel that much different from any other day. You may wake up a little tired after the party you attended the night before, but stores stay open and Howie Mandel still offers excited individuals deals in exchange for suitcases. However, somehow it feels different. It’s like we turn open a new book in the shelf of life and have just started to read the pages. The characters may seem familiar and the plot details too, yet the tone of the narration has slightly changed. For some of us, it is a little more hopeful and for others, there is a tinge of sorrow.. We make resolutions about things that we could have tried to change at any point in time. However, it is this fresh feeling that we get with a new year that enables us to put behind our past mistakes and trudge forward.