What New Year’s really means.
Guess what: our calendar is only 431 years old.
While most people using the Western/Gregorian calendar might understandably assume that our calendar is now 2,014 years old, that just ain’t so. It is in fact (as of this writing) only 431 years old, having been brought into existence in 1582 to mark the precise celebration of Easter.
Our calendar is called the Gregorian calendar because it was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII via a papal bull — a decree — signed on February 24, 1582. It was several centuries before it was adopted throughout the western world.
Pope Gregory XIII’s motivation for his reform was that the Roman Julian calendar (which had preceded it) placed the time between vernal equinoxes (a “year,” or a full rotation around the sun) at 365.25 days, when in fact it is roughly 11 minutes shorter per year. (Extremely cool math for 1582, eh?)
With the aid of Jesuit priest/astronomer Christopher Clavius (who built on the work of Aloysius Lilius/Luigi Lilio) it was determined that the 11-minute error added up to about three days every four centuries. That resulted (back in Pope Gregory XIII’s day) in the equinox occurring on March 11, and moving earlier and earlier in the Julian calendar.
You know why that irked Pope Gregory, right? The date for celebrating Easter wasn’t at all reliable. And Easter is the single most important date for the Roman Catholic Church.
Pope Gregory XIII et al calculated Easter, by the way, using the Hebrew calendar to accurately fix the date of “the last supper,” which was in fact a Passover meal that Jesus was attending with his fellow Jewish disciples. Pope Gregory XIII wanted to be sure that Easter was being celebrated on the correct date, year in and year out, so the date of “the last supper” was the starting point for the development of his new calendar.
Today, of course, we think of the calendar as a business tool rather than a way to keep track of religious events. And commerce was the main reason the Gregorian calendar was ultimately adopted. But it’s worth remembering that its origins were entirely based on setting the correct dates for religious celebrations.
Think about this: anybody who uses a computer, anywhere in the world, inevitably is following the Gregorian calendar.
Is it New Year’s everywhere?
2014 will no doubt see further globalization take hold. Our clothing, computers and customer service (alas …) can come from anywhere in the world. Our economy is clearly affected by global events and our export markets can be countries that not long ago did not even appear on our maps.
Brazil, for example, has taken a monster lead on the global stage, having moved ahead of Great Britain in 2011. So, too have Russia, India and China moved up. (Investors call them the BRIC nations and place “emerging markets” investments there.) Portugal, Italy Greece and Spain now worry the rest of the world when their economies teeter, and teeter they do.
So, bearing all that in mind, does January 1 have the same significance to all inhabitants of planet earth? How about to the Chinese or Indians? Or those who continue to follow the Hebraic and Islamic calendars, both of which are based on lunar rather than solar cycles? For the Chinese, 2013 was 4711 (or 4651 depending on their epoch starting point) and the Chinese year 4712 begins on Jan. 31, 2014.
For those following the Hebrew calendar, 2013 was 5773 and 5774. And for those using the Islamic calendar, 2013 was 1434 and 1435. India has as many calendars as it has religions, though in 1957 they settled on the Indian national calendar (Saka) to align themselves with the Gregorian calendar.
The diversity of global populations is one of the reasons that New Year’s celebrations have always struck me as a tad odd. First of all, Father Time is winning, whichever calendar you use. Every new year means that everyone is a year older. Not sure about cheering that. And, as you can tell from the preceding paragraph, the yearly cycle is hardly celebrated (or measured) the same way by all people on earth.
Perhaps some of the old Roman and pagan superstitions lurk in our Bacchanalian New Year’s celebrations. Perhaps we truly think that we and the world will be magically different when the ball drops and the calendar changes.
What do we measure when we measure time?
Clocks, watches, calendars … do they measure actual time, or the experience of the passage of time?
It seems that we “mark time” rather than inhabit it. We tick off the time we’ve used and we look forward to some future calendar event, which might be a religious holiday or vacation, and which will only arrive after we’ve marked off the appropriate amount of time.
But time, according to Albert Einstein, was an indication of our relationship to space and gravity — how fast and how far we were able to move through space. And, in a way, that’s what we’re actually measuring when we say “day, week, month and year.” A day is the spinning of the earth on its axis (creating the illusion of sun-up, sun-down). A year is the time it takes for our earth to orbit the sun completely — an elliptical journey that takes us closer to and farther from the sun, creating our seasons.
Bearing that in mind, it’s possible to see that days and years are in reality markers of time/space travel, while other calendar-based measurements are an artificial construct that in fact simply measure the passage of time as it relates to us. In other words, what we think of as time is highly subjective.
Einstein and Paul Langevin addressed that “relativity” with a theory of time (one of my favorites) that has come to be called the “twins paradox.” It goes like this: one twin leaves the earth traveling at the speed of light and returns seven years later; the other twin stays behind. For the traveling twin, only seven years have passed, so he has only aged by seven years. But for his brother, back on earth, several decades have passed and he is now elderly. How can this be? (For a practical demonstration, watch the Jodi Foster film “Contact,” from a story by Carl Sagan.)
It’s all relative.
The point is that time is not as fixed as we think it is … or as our Gregorian calendar would have us believe. In fact, time is entirely relative. So we do not measure time objectively, but rather subjectively, based on our experience of time on our planet and the calendar we’re using.
We subjectively say, “one year has passed,” “our child is two years old,” “we have a doctor’s appointment next Monday.” All of these are important, yet create a slightly false or inaccurate sense of time, an imposed sense of time, one that doesn’t matter to or affect the movement of the planets around our star.
Think of it this way: if we were still using the Julian calendar, we’d experience time differently. The same goes if we were using lunar calendars — New Year’s day would come more often. Which is why I just can’t help remembering that the calendar we’ve all agreed to use isn’t even 500 years old, and that it has a back-dated, highly subjective starting point.
In fact, the new year did not always begin on January 1 for everyone everywhere. It depended entirely on which calendar was being used. What we now call New Year’s day is a relatively recent innovation, and an entirely subjective event.
Happy New Calendar.
New Year’s used to be celebrated on days such as the vernal or autumnal equinox — days when you can actually feel something new is coming. That’s what Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” was all about.
No one can deny that our lives are run by calendars. They determine when we go to work and when we rest. They determine when we play and when we pray. They determine when we’re paid, and even how much. And all of that works because we all agree to it. Do we have a choice? Not really. But I’m certain if you asked any number of people what their favorite day is, the most frequent answer would be whatever day they consider the sabbath.
And all of that is why I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. But, hey, knock yourself out.
New Year’s is supposed to be about new beginnings. January 1 strikes me as a very poor date for that. What it really means is that we’re celebrating a calendar event rather than a cyclical, natural event. It seems to come down to celebrating Happy New Calendar. I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else.
