Musing

-4C/24F, calm, soft cloud blanket covers the city, snow predicted (and wanted), the landscape so brown, so dreary, so dust-laden

muser news - CB celebrates a birthday, congrats!; I had a great little trip to Red Deer yesterday, lunch with DB and a visit with CG, several ‘catch up and late Christmas calls’, drove by a client’s property to check things out, then back to Calgary again in heavy holiday traffic; SC arrives today for a visit

Gusta runs with no regard for anything but her next sniff; she does not notice Wednesday from any other, that most people are not working, that official holidays are over, that the new year is coming, or that the old one is coming to a close

my work load for the next few days is pretty simple; eat, play, read, write and finish things I started this year, finish them this week and to NOT leave any of those bits untouched, unresolved, un-handled . . lingering into the new year; not working this week feels weird, as does working; starting today Calgary, like most places, will slowly resume its normal pace by Jan. 8th

we live in a society where so much is attached to this new year/old year dynamic

I wonder if it would be such a big deal if it were not so close to Christmas; what is it about this date on a calendar that drives us to organize life and business the way we do?

the 'NEW year', this silly arbitrary thing - as is a week or a month - just ways we group days to give us reference points so we know when to do things; April 3 or July 6 or October 15 are just as worthy - they could be the first day of the year preceded by a new year’s eve celebration; totally arbitrary

why could ‘year end’ not be March 13 or November 4th?

everything that is good is going, happening, alive and moving in some direction whereas endings, closure and stopping have such general negative connotations

yet once a year we celebrate the hinge point, marking the spine of the book rather than its
contents; we are inundated by news media (bereft of much real news this week anyway) to
parading pundits, economists and politicos whose only common noteworthy element is their failure to predict anything - they get them together to predict the future . . while we read and listen with interest . . hoping someone will paint the way for us; if we did not STOP, would we not just continue?

why stop, why pause, why lose momentum?

if we did not have this arbitrary STOP, look forward, look back, ‘close off the books’ event would we stop to second guess everything we did last year, to praise or vilify the lucky and the unlucky?

these are not the ramblings of a master procrastinator, but I do wonder if we would function differently if we were not so organized around a calendar year, a fiscal year or an academic year – each arbitrary milestones (or is that millstones?) forcing our activities into organized form around a stop, a start; an end, a beginning

tradition I suppose . . mixed with GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) . . mixed with a need to focus our thoughts forward, a last backward glance, before we embark on new things

every day, whether the beginning or end of the year, people and memories fade . . fade away, every day new babes are born

we can embark on new things any old time we want

we can close off or end something that is done, any old time we want

any auld tyme

Mark
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