Writer's Block Magazine

What is this new year? What has changed?– I have frequently asked myself, staring into a sky lightened up by colourful lights at midnight 1^st January. There is champagne, partying, playing board games, concerts and films on TV. Change is in the air; politicians make promises of a better economy, cooperation and security; individuals make resolutions to lose weight, do sports, and go out more. Everyone hopes that the mistakes of the past can and will be avoided, tomorrow will become the better, updated version of yesterday. Yet everything will resolve more or less the same way it did, the change will come gradually, secretly, in a moment that will not be registered by our memory banks. Then, why do we keep hoping, waiting and spending money for beautiful but useless fireworks? I believe it is because we need a day to acknowledge the cycles that end and begin in our lives, otherwise we would get older without noticing a change in journeying through the big continuum, called life.

Paradoxically, the pure concept of time doesn’t exist, as we measure it through another category, the distance. Science tells us that the year is the time that our funny little planet needs to cover to go round the Sun – it is exactly 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes. The day ends when our planet completes the full spin on its own axis, on average 24 hours. However, the objective truth of these facts is impossible to adopt in everyday life. Our year is not exactly 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, but it is 365 days and during leap year it is 366 days. Our daily time does not correlate with sunrise and sunset as we have moved from the solar time, and use standard time zones, so that the time is unified within the borders of our countries. This change came to being in the 19th century, the demands of industry and railway enforced one time zone across all Britain,  creating the famous Greenwich Mean Time.

The arbitrariness of our measuring techniques lurks everywhere and it is most evident in our celebration of New Year. Everyday could be the beginning of the next year, yet we limit ourselves to a single day of celebration, a day marked by centuries of tradition. The fact that different cultural regions differ in their chosen day for the beginning of the year is a wide phenomenon. The New Year’s as we know in the West celebrated on 1^st January, is a remnant of an old cult of Roman god, Janus, the god of new beginnings. In other cultures however, New Year is celebrated on different dates. The famous Chinese New Year according to the lunar calendar usually falls by the end of January. Islamic New Year happens in the summer, oscillating between June or July, and Persian New Year is typically held in March. New Year being celebrated so widely around the world, though on different days, shows us the universal human desire to control and codify our time, something strange and shapeless that constantly eludes our grasp.

The inadequacies in our measuring of time is only the tip of the iceberg, the true enigma is our subjective experience of passing time. We have seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years, but they no more capture our true thoughts, emotions and actions than a form reveals the taste of the cookie within. Time only provides a frame, as the same hour can be multiple things:

entertainment: an episode of a Netflix series, sports time, a trip, a date, a conversation;
a duty: a boring school lesson, tedious task at work, a household chore, grocery shopping;
a dramatic event: seeing your ex, a lost wallet, a broken leg, a car accident, death;
life changed or unchanged, life continued or lost. 

We all seem to know it, but yet we often find ourselves amazed by how time passes too quickly or too slowly, how things become turned upside down in a split of a second. We feel proprietorial about time, because it signifies different stages of our lives from birth to death, and therefore we believe we have a right to tell others how they ought to use, spend, and celebrate it.

The main character in “Alice in Wonderland” during the famous tea-party scene, tells Hatter: “I think you might do something better with the time, (…) than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers” and the Hatter replies: “If you knew Time as well as I do, (…) you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.” On the first glance, the exchange seems rather nonsensical, but in the context of our discussion about the arbitrariness of time it begins to make sense. Time cannot be wasted as it doesn’t really have a normal existence, it is defined, prescribed, and categorised by us. In a popular understanding the phrase “wasting time” means spending time in a way that is not beneficial to our future. It is mostly used to describe someone’s entertainment like playing video games, scrolling social media, watching TV and serious life problems: being stuck in an unwanted career or relationship. However, nothing is redundant, these things can help us to rewind, but also teach us how to live and make decisions. Hatter’s response to Alice that time is a person, reveals that time is not a stable object but belongs to the human. It is the realm of our personal illusion. As Alice lives in a dream, where time evades simple measures, so do we all.

Next time when you will look into fireworks in the sky on January 1st, rejoice like everyone but know that the New Year is not an “it” but a “he”, a “she”, and “they” dreaming of what a future will be.