Throwing Mangos at Cats

I’ve never been one to give much significance to arbitrary benchmarks like new years, centuries or millennia; for most of my life I never needed any specific reason for being irresponsibly over self-indulgent and my enthusiasm for December 31st lay principally in the fact that I was likely to have company in doing so. Nobody really knows when anything started or where we are on the theoretical time-line that runs from nothing to nothing again, but certainly there are natural cycles which have been of great importance to humans through the eons, though modern delineations of time probably have more to do with the bureaucratic need to categorize and inventory than they do with planting schedules. Time, like the ghosts it creates, most likely doesn’t exist in any real sense, but is just another by-product of our change-obsessed consciousness which allows us to experience discreet events and impose artificial order on the bubbling quantum foam which underlies all.

What the idea of time is good for is forgetting, forgiving and fooling ourselves into believing that personal change is some magical quality that can be found in Santa’s bag or at the bottom of a punch bowl and that all we need do is declare a break with the past and start anew and fundamentals will be transmuted, psychological baggage abandoned, genetic predispositions obviated and inherent flaws corrected. Time is the almighty, universal stain remover which washes away sin and grief and failure and allows us to stand new-born and pure in the face of the impending, if arbitrarily defined, year.

The odd thing is that, my innate sarcasm notwithstanding; there may be some fundamental element of human truth to the concept of a fresh start. Despite the weight of our social and natural sagas, there remains in even the most shallow and traumatized of us the potential to re-invent ourselves, to be more than just a point on a line or the sum of converging history. Genetic determinism is powerful, like dialectical materialism and dual predestination before it, but the entire mechanical structure of the universe defines nothing but probability; reality obeys less well established laws. Perhaps it was Heisenberg who first used mathematics to express the concept that “life is what you make it”, but Schrödinger was definitely the guy who discovered that old cats can teach new tricks and that life really is like a box of chocolates. So pay heed you masses in your quiet desperation; a year is just a year, but a new year is a choice. Get busy.