Written by: Muhammad Shaafay Saqib
Edited by: Noor Ul Ain Adeel
Graphic by: Uzair Hussain
It’s this old-fashioned new-year thing.
It happens every year.
Near the end of every year, humans look fondly towards the next. It’s time for hope and real change. Bask in this wonderful, regular marker in the timeline of our lives that looks at us to tranquilly correct the mistakes of the year prior. Especially after the momentous turbulence of 2020, it becomes therapeutic to wait for a hero in the new year, no, the new decade, as a shining glimmer of hope that change is imminent, for as the clock ticks itself on, our problems may turn itself off. As the sun sets, our old, toxic adventures can ride down away into the golden road. This is the time. It is. We feel. Except.
It’s arbitrary.
It doesn’t matter.
Nothing will change. This year will be just like the last. The year, as most widely considered, is merely a solar concept. It need not matter when you start executing your plans for the year; if January the 1st suits, good for you. Otherwise you may decide on June the 27th, or rather April the 22nd, before settling on December the 19th. There are those who rest the weight of their resolutions on the start of the year, then fail (dishonor on their cow, no question), and unnerve while their optimism scurries with its claws under floorboards. It does not have to be this way. Because.
It’s just another revolution around the sun.
Nothing needs to happen right now.
Do you know how many calendars there are? Neither do I, but there are a lot. The Gregorian Calendar, whose trendsetting dates form the raison d’être of this piece of writing, is a solar calendar, marked by our position around the sun. On the other hand, we have the Hijri calendar, a lunar calendar marked by the glimmering phases of the moon. Then there are those who can’t choose so we have the Hebrew lunisolar calendar. Calendars come and go — even the Gregorian existed not about four hundred years ago. It replaced the Julian Calendar in 1582, adjusting errors to align more accurately with the planet’s circling of the sun. To make this correction, it added eleven days. All at once. Dumped. Understandably, some were aghast. They demanded their eleven days back! Nevertheless, it was a small, slight incremental change that helped make things better in the long run. They got over it and it never really should have mattered. In fact, a few days prior to the publishing of this article, it was still 2020 in the Julian Calendar. Hence.
Happy (another?) New Year!
Do you feel real change, again?
You want real change? You need a revolution. Slice up the feudal monarchists like the French did, under romanticized guillotines in public displays of capital punishment (ouch). The self-absorbed foreign queen requested that you eat cake, so you storm the Bastille, overthrow her government and start decimalizing everything.
March on like they did, in love of your country, but also the number ten. The ten isn’t random; they did do it. They tried to decimalize the darn clock. For a while, France lived ten hours a day, each in 100 decimal minutes with each of that in 100 decimal seconds — imagine if that stuck. Sure, they had their functional justifications, of which there were many, but in the end… why? Clocks are our clocks, days are our days, and weeks are our weeks.
No.
It may have meaning, but it’s all arbitrary happenstance. Change it. Who cares? Your community and nation bear meaning, while community and nationhood are coincidental. Most of us didn’t choose and so we just were. Friends bear meaning, but friends are only chance. They are a product of where we lived, whether we moved or where we studied, among many playing factors. Family bears the most meaning, but family is only random. We feel like we have structure and reason but beneath it all, it’s determined chaos and capricious, irrational evolution. Nearly everything can be changed over time, even the definition of time itself. Yet, somehow, it all carries meaning to us. We hold. We endow. We love.
We meander through a world that is constantly changing in ridiculous ways, and perhaps we did not need 2020 to tell us that. Planning is amazing, but fate-interlaced-chance is inevitable. Why mark the time to change solely at dawn, when change then happens at dusk? Your thoughts continually revolve around your mind, building and replacing bricks in your brain, little by little, piece by piece. The feeling is of the determined and chaotic simultaneously, like a butterfly that caused a tornado, or a neatly defined structure no longer after an earthquake. In spite of the metaphorical bedlam, an impetus of the arbitrary, we will give meaning to it all, because that is what we do as humans. Give meaning to each second, as a chance to start anew and hoist ourselves in the right direction, embracing the sense of calm that comes with staying within the topsy-turvy roads of betterment, hope, and love for one another. Just like political upheaval, it may seem like the year is just happening and it makes no sense why it should be like this, good or bad, but we will still try to find meaning and that is okay. You know why? Because it helps us take the next, gradual step in right direction, and know where we are going in the grand scheme of things.
Let’s calm down. Change things up a bit.
A tiny shift could happen right now.
It’s just another revolution inside ourselves.
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