When New Years Are Gone

Like the leaves of an old calendar, memories fade and fly away with the passage of time. There are events not long ago that cannot be revisited anymore. There are stories beyond remembering. They are in a file that consciousness could not retrieve.

What favorite scenes in your childhood are now sealed in the chamber named forgotten? Of course you cannot answer because amnesia has gotten the better of them.

Such, are some fragments of history that have helped form our present. Such, are cherished moments in the past that try as you may, are already beyond capture.

I sometimes ask what New Year celebration in the past strikes most. Hard to say. Each one would always be the same. It is thought to bring something new, but ushers more of the same.

The stroke of midnight slithers to the first hour of the new day. What leap in time has happened? What divide has been bounded?

Hey it’s New Year! Yeah, the seconds tick towards the dead of the night then erupts in mass ecstasy, so short and ephemeral it easily fizzles unto the quiet break of dawn.

The burst of revelry, the explosion of fireworks, and what else humans can do herald the anticlimax. They do not climax, because too many times of doing the expected have made it banal, like waking up in the morning to the same sky framed by the old familiar window.

Why New Years are not the best remembered is obvious. They fortuitously become an insignificant flash in the time continuum, a human-marked point of shift to another cycle that blurs to nothingness.

Even the havoc on lives and property wrought by firecrackers and accidental firing stops to matter so soon. Things have become predictably repetitive that the burned, injured, decapitated and just shocked have a dull reception waiting at hospitals ahead of schedule.

The millennium crossover in 2000 once stood out. Billions of folks throughout the world made much of the imaginary divide. They strove to pin great meaning to a switch of two one-thousand years.

Visualize a thousand years of religion infused into human social history cutting off like a capsule of a rocket ship, and vanishing into the cosmos. But no matter how, it could not be frozen in eternity. In a little while, humanity would leave the sensation and go back to religion and the same old reality.

The counting of hours and days proceeds with a future to worry about. Humans do not have a way of untangling from the past, the lens in which they see the future. The ghost of a time gone haunts them in a state of non-existence recognized as tomorrow.

So this is what the New Year is about: tomorrow in the sights of yesterday. For tomorrow does not appear as tomorrow. It appears as experience waiting to happen again, a reality that is but a dream, for to become truly real it must be the present.

To be truly real, it must be undergone, and thereby cease being a future. It must also be an experience no longer in the past, but in the here and now.

Can you make it your resolution to have no more New Year’s resolutions? Only New Year reflections. Can you care no more to see the future, more so from the lens of the past? Only to open doors to knowing and learning afresh.

Memory is the flaming cylinder of the trajectory streaking in the outer space above the speed of sound. Once fired off, it detaches and disappears into the celestial ranges. But if encountered yet again, stare not at its core, for it will look back with hypnotic spell to lull the unwary to a dream-like stupor.

Imagine time being abolished by a new charter of man. There are no more hours, days and years. There are only changes, the coming and going of phenomena, physical and spiritual matter in a flux, things vanishing and becoming in the plain of the permanent present.

Folks do not mark a year as new or old. They do not have anything to do with any year at all anymore. There is no end, only transition. Consciousness now perceives the aspect of eternity.

History won’t be written again by avowed witnesses merely wanting the people to see it their way. It will be removed from the simple chronology of events, and interpretation in accordance with someone’s biases and intentional misconceptions.

No one will have misgivings anymore. No one will excruciate in the graveyard of the dead past. History will no longer be a piece of writing within the covers of a thick book. It will be no other than the living reality of the masses shaping the present constantly achanging.

When life is not measured anymore by the pages of the calendar, or subjected to the hands sweeping around the clock’s dial, mankind will be out of the time divides. With such, the psycho-physical benefits will be tremendous this space is too miniscule to write them.

Pressure for one will stop knocking on one’s door or waking up someone in the morning who is enjoying his prolonged detachment. Deadlines will cease to nag. Urgency along with its tensions will keep quiet. Schedules will desist from turning the hounded into nervous wrecks.

The giant waves of revelers all over the globe will save breath from not blowing horns, eardrums from not dragging cans on streets, fingers from not lighting firecrackers, and a beating heart from the silence of one powerful blast nobody expects or wants to snuff an ill-fated welcome of the New Year.