I don’t know about you, but when I picture the year it’s a long, tall rectangle, with January at the top and December at the bottom, and part of the magic of New Year’s Eve is that as the ball drops the whole universe somehow finds its way back up to January and starts the year all over again. It’s a little jarring, because throughout the year in my mind we’re sliding downward, each month neatly connecting to the bottom of the month before like a puzzle piece, and then somehow at midnight on the 31st we’re climbing in the opposite direction. Maybe some people picture the year rolling out sideways and each month just tacks on the right, but then we have to make that climb to the top each month, and that seems worse.
This comes from a lifetime of looking at calendars, of course, up to down or left to right. It’s a visual representation of time, a little model we construct in our heads to organize and plan for the future. A template we force on the universe, helpful, but not really accurate. Because, of course, time is not a series of rectangles, it’s more like an arrow, a really long arrow. And we just randomly section it off from time to time. One way to see this is to look at a calendar and take note of the many different days throughout the year that the new year begins for different cultures and beliefs.
The National Geographic website gave me eight new year’s days to choose from, although I suspect it’s not a comprehensive list:
Gregorian New Year, January 1, 2026
This would be the one we just did.
Lunar New Year, February 17, 2026
China, East Asia
Nowruz, March 20, 2026
Iran, and parts of the middle east
Songkran, April 13-15, 2026
Thailand
Muharram, June 17, 2026
The start of the Islamic Calendar
Enkutatash, September 11, 2026
Ethiopia and Eritrea
Diwali, November 8, 2026
Hindu new year
Rosh Hashanah, September 11-13, 2026
The Jewish new Year
The New Year starts on a lot of different days for a lot of different people, which is awesome, and a great excuse to drink champagne any day of the year. It also shows something else, that time is not a box on the wall, or a number in an app, it’s continuous. A spool constantly unfolding.
Time is part of the universe, not a big grandfather clock ticking outside of it. Einstein and others showed that the passage of time is affected by relative velocity, and mass. It’s integrated into the universe, and so it’s potentially a paradox to ask what happened “before” the big bang, since time itself may have originated with the big bang, and so “before” didn’t exist before the big bang. This is about the point at which my lovely wife tells me to “zip it”, because I’m giving her a headache.
It’s not a bad thing to divide time into years, of course, and if we have a year it has to start somewhere, and every new beginning is a chance to look back and look forward. By the way, the past is something you reconstruct in your brain, and the future is a model you are imagining in your mind of what might happen, so the only real thing is this moment right…here.
I know, zip it.
I think we should all make resolutions and keep them. Or don’t make any resolutions and definitely don’t keep them. Just make sure to live this life and resolve to do the best you can.
Happy New Year, AMSG. I hope this new year is wonderful for you, and for all of us, everywhere. But don’t worry, if it isn’t you get your first do-over on February 17th.
Written by: Jeffrey Dewhurst