EDITORIAL: Another new year; another new chance

We happen to begin our year on January 1. Although this roughly coincides with the winter solstice when, for the northern half of the world, the nights begin shortening and the days slowly lengthening, it is a purely arbitrary convention.

The ancient Greeks, we are told, began their new year on June 21, at the summer solstice. The Egyptians chose September 21, the day of the autumnal equinox. In the modern world, Muslims begin their calendar year on the first Muharram, about our June 15. In Iran, the year begins in March; in Ethiopia, in September.

The point is that in all times and all places, people have had their equivalent of New Year’s Day. In the beginning, of course, the marking of the new year was a priestly function, attended by ritual and ceremony. Upon its accurate determination depended such all-important activities as the sowing or reaping of crops. Primitive man in the cold north believed that the return of the sun from its apparent journey south in the winter would not occur without his prayers and exhortations.

We know better today. We know that the seasons will come and go, that the earth will continue wheeling about the sun, no matter what we do, even if we devastate its surface.

But New Year’s Day is still important to us. If we didn’t have it, we would have to invent it all over again.

For the new year is a crisp, clean, unwritten-upon page of time, when new hopes are born and old ones rekindled. No matter how good or bad the old year was, we feel that things will surely be better during the coming one. It is a fresh start, something which a messed-up world sorely needs every 12 months.

Too often, though, we tend to think in terms of what the new year will bring to us rather than what we will bring to it — that it is merely one more cycle of our aging rather than a new cycle of our growth.

Perhaps we could take a lesson from our ancestors, after all, and instead of being passive spectators to the march of time, act as if the very turning of the world itself depended upon what we did.

Who knows? Perhaps it does.