When the 1st of January comes around, we update our calendars and reset our watches to welcome the arrival of a new cycle. We pop bottles of champagne, we raise our glasses, we kiss our loved ones and we watch fireworks go off around the globe. I find myself wondering, what do we celebrate when we celebrate new years?
I have long been pondering over the definition of time, and the tools and common languages we use to measure it (if you’d like to go down more rabbit holes there, can visit one of my blogs written a year ago – How timely is it to talk about time?). Even though time is not tangible and its very existence as a fundamental element of reality remains unclear (according to Google’s GAI model 🙂), the tools and common languages we created e.g. calendars and watches, are effective to measure it.
It’s then worth pondering to me – why is it that even though time may not be physically real, we can be so acutely aware of the passing of time? And more importantly, when are we most sensitive to it?
To me, the answer has gotten clear in the past year – I’d become more aware of time when I sense change in events that I care about. In another word, time would not have existed had there been no events in the universe. Fortunately and coincidentally, there are boundless events happening in our universe:
- The Sun came to be
- Our Planet Earth came to be
- In the past 6 weeks, there have been 4 newborn babies in my friends circle that came to be
- You came to be
- I came to be
- At this precise moment, you are reading my gibberish and I am writing more gibberish. This connection created by my gibberish between us is one of the many events unfolding in this universe and in this timeline we call life.
Every event comes with a beginning and an end. And every living organism is an event of their own. We cannot physically traverse the endpoint, nor would we ever know what lies beyond it. This inherent finality brings a sense of loss that translates to the most acute awareness of the passing of time.
But we always have an option to shut it off – we could simply stop caring for any events to desensitise. Imagine a world where we would stop caring for any events including ourselves, we would become insensitive to their ends, and subsequently become numb to the passing of time.
This desensitising option though is incredibly difficult to pull it off under normal circumstances psychologically. Because we couldn’t help but care – we couldn’t help but want to love, to feel and to impact people, communities and organisations we care for. Because it simply feels too good to love and to be loved.
To love is a uniquely human experience (major caveat that aliens could also have the ability to love). And it brings us the cruellest trade indefinitely – because on one hand, we have the complete freedom to care and to love for any events in the world; and yet on the other hand, love guarantees us the suffering that eventual ends of all events we care for would bring.
But this trade is also truly fair and it defines the game of being and the rule of life. Because the beginning and the end of every event help us sense make our tradeoffs, and our tradeoffs give weight and urgency to every decision we make. All the decisions we make and the impacts we create collectively on subsequent events make this game of life engaging and meaningful.
By this token, we feel the passing of time because we are capable of loving and being loved. Our ability to love and to be loved then defines how our time passes in this universe.
So maybe, just maybe, that is why we celebrate new years – because we want to celebrate the passing of time, because we want to celebrate what makes us human, and because we want to celebrate love.
In this new year, I wish myself the ever growing capacity to love and to be loved – to love myself, to love my friends and family, and to love what I do.
May we all love more abundantly.
