THROUGH UNTRUE
A few days from now, we will celebrate the New Year. If you stop to think about it, "New Year" is essentially a product of our imagination. Time is real, yet we experience it as a continuous, unbroken flow. To make sense of this, we use mental constructs like years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds to help us track the passage of time and highlight the events that matter most in our life.
A year consists of 365 days (or 366 in a leap year), which is the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun. The tradition of starting the new year on Jan. 1 stems from the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. However, people from different cultures have developed their own calendars.
For us Christians, the New Year is a time for reflection, renewal, and goal-setting. It acts as a milestone, offering hope for a longer, more meaningful life. Sadly, many people dread the New Year, viewing it as a reminder of aging and, more grimly, of our mortality. A biblical passage intensifies this somber perspective: “Our lifespan is 70 years, or 80 for those who are strong; most of these are emptiness and pain. They pass swiftly, and we are gone” (Psalm 90:10).
This bleak view can change if we consider our years in the way the poet Philip Larkin suggested. If we condense 70 years into seven decades, and each decade into a single day, our entire lifespan can be viewed as barely one week. You are born on Monday morning, and you die on Sunday evening. If you are 30 years old today, you are already in the middle of Wednesday, with only four days left. If you are 65, you are at noon on Sunday, with just a few hours remaining before you give up your last breath.
Looking at our lives this way heightens the urgency to utilize the time we have. It is also more realistic because we experience life not as decades or years, but as moments. By focusing on these moments, we can see each new year not just as one measure of our life’s duration, but as a series of fresh opportunities to experience meaningful experiences. If you measure life by years, you grow older. But if you embrace life moment by moment, you become newer.
You become new at each moment if you take advantage of what it offers—an opportunity for change or transformation. But, for something new to emerge, we must let go of the old. Real change begins with an ending. This principle is true even in nature. As the ancient philosophers observed: “Corruptio unius est generatio alterius.” The death of one organism paves the way for the birth of another. Whether in personal growth, societal movements, or the natural world, endings hold the power to spark significant change.
The New Year is like a crossroads, urging us to make choices that can lead us toward transformation. We can opt to hold on to everything, resisting change to preserve our comfortable but stagnant lives. Or, we can choose to let go of old habits, toxic relationships, limiting beliefs, outdated mindsets, or identities that no longer serve us. Letting go may be painful, but it is by embracing this pain that we create the clarity and space necessary for new beginnings that foster growth, healing, and progress.
On New Year's Day, break the habit of obsessively checking the clock, your watch, or any device that measures time. Instead, focus on each God-given moment—brief and fleeting though it may be—because it offers us the chance to live fully and become the person we are meant to be.