A new year. Ten days into a new beginning. One more circle around the sun. The celebration of the western New Year on January 1st is a relatively new phenomenon—the Romans didn’t even include January and February in their calendar until 713 B.C., and the “new” year, which coincided with the start of the new consular term, wasn’t switched from March 15 (the infamous “Ides of March”) to January 1st until 153 B.C. England only changed its recognition of the new year from March 25 (the Annunciation, or conception of Jesus) to January 1st in 1752.
But the concept of a New Year, and all the clean-sheet, start-over possibility it entails, is almost universal. Even the Aztec calendar symbol for the post-winter-solstice period, which coincided roughly with the Aztec new year, meant “stretching for growth.”
And in theory, we love that idea of a new year “do-over” with fresh possibilities for change and growth. We wipe our brows with collective relief at the ending of what we can no longer change, and determine to remake ourselves and our lives in the new dawn of day. This year will be better. We will lose weight. Sleep more. Find balance. Be happy. Succeed. And we make these resolutions with cheery wishes of optimism, and big smiles upon our faces.
So given how happily we greet the uncharted landscape and clean-sheet possibilities that a new year offers, one might wonder why we’re so often terrified about the uncharted landscape and clean-sheet possibilities that a sudden shift in life events presents.
My guess is that our dreams of January renewal are about positive, voluntary changes and goals that nobody will hold us to if we don’t quite manage to achieve them. Involuntary change, when gently demurring when the going gets tough isn’t an option, is much more serious stuff. And if we no longer have a fall-back position of the status quo, it can also be pretty scary stuff.
Nonetheless, it’s worth remembering that a part of us, inside, welcomes the chance to rewrite the script of our lives. We never know what a new year will hold. And if we are honest, and older than 15, we know from experience it will be a mixed bag of good, hard, happy and challenging. But how we look at an uncertain future matters. We welcome the new year because, at least one day a year, we choose to look at the positive possibilities an unwritten landscape offers, instead the negative risks.
And so, for that one day, we glimpse the feeling of excitement and possibility that any entrepreneur or adventurer feels when they leave the comfort and limits of security behind, and begin to blaze their own trail through the wilderness. All is new; all is possible. The risks are there, but so is the freedom. And somewhere in the mix, is the energy of New Year’s Day—every day.
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That was very well put and inspiring, about how we are able to greet a new year with rosy expectations. I have some doubts about the ancient history part — that is, I too have seen it stated that the early Roman year had only ten months in it, but I cannot easily believe that. If your calendar year had only ten months to it, how long would it take you to realize there was something dreadfully wrong with it? After only two years your calendar would be out of sync with the seasons by four whole months, and you could not possibly fail to notice it. I don’t think we actually have any Roman historical documents from those early days. All we have is what some Romans of more classical times — Livy for example — wrote about the early history long after the event. I personally believe that the early Roman ten-month calendar is in the same league with Romulus and Remus.
It is undoubtedly true, though, that the Roman calendar had got badly out of sync by Julius Caesar’;s time, and that is why he made his famous calendar reform. It had got out of sync because it was a lunar clendar, as nearly all of them were in those days except the Egyptian. In a lunar calendar you have to add a 13th month about once every 3 years, and the pontifexcs in charage of that had been abusing their power to do it. Most public officals held office for just one year at a time, and to them a 13th month was a significant extension of their term. So they would exert themselves to influcence the pontifexes however they could. I think that was the source of the calendar trouble that Caesar did away with.