The Christmas gift wrapping is all torn up and the clothes and toys they contained are being worn and used. Now for the grand finale to the Holiday season, the New Year! Reflection on the past year are abound and hopeful resolutions are popping up all over the nation for the sake of a brighter future. Bright times ahead seems to be the general consensus. And then there’s me. I just brace for all the resolution and “new year, new me” posts on social media while I get dressed up for the occasion as is tradition with my family. Most people would and have looked at that and figured I was just the New Year’s equivalent of Ebenezer Scrooge, but I don’t say that just for the fun (or lack of fun) of it. Our understanding of time is what gives me my reason, hear me out and you might just find something to help you in your own life.

So before I get into my reasoning, lets look at what New Years Day is. Here we are celebrating the end of a calendar year and the beginning of a new one. That calendar year is based on the Earth’s orbit of the Sun, meaning when the year ends is when we complete a whole revolution around our warming star. Keeping that in mind, we are essentially cheering on the Earth for making it’s way around the Sun, as one would cheer a marathon runner at the end of a race. The difference between the Earth’s race and a marathon is that the Earth’s race is in a never-ending circle, only to start right away onto the next calendar year’s race. But why that day in particular? It’s not like the sky flashes a large “Congrats Earth!” to let everyone know it’s raced it’s annual trek, imagine how much that would’ve freaked out ancient civilizations! No the sky is just as dark and star studded as any other night, and the sun will rise just like every other day in the morning. So once again we ask, why that day?

Now we begin to reveal my problem with the common notion of the New Year being a time to flip a switch. Time doesn’t really have such a neat denomination like years. A year is basically a measure of time we created based on an astronomical event. We could’ve chosen any other astronomical event (and we have! Just ask the Mayans) to model our calendar around. Yet despite this, we treat the New Year as if we were born again, to a whole new life. This is flawed because it treats our understanding of time as if each unit were a mutually exclusive bin when, in reality, time is a continuum. Time simply flows, with no real boundaries or schedule and that’s the major flaw in our thinking about time.

Now please don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not trying to convince you to throw away the concept of deciding to improve yourself. The problem is why wait until the New Year? In theory as described before, you could do that any day to the same effect. What we need to understand about this analysis is that we are free to do this whenever. You can make that change whenever you want! The important part in this is to have the self-awareness to see where you can improve yourself, the resolve to start the change, and the resilience to integrate that change into a new, healthier, better lifestyle for yourself. The key isn’t in a magical day that has the power to change lives, it’s the person. It’s up to you to make the change.