Happy Arbitrary Moment in Time! And an Announcement.
Counting down to the New Year has got to be one of the silliest things our culture does. Our world is artificially segmented into time zones, which cause the entire planet to function as a 24-hour clock, the hours clicking along from zone to zone as if the planet was rotating like the ticking second hand on the 60 Minutes watch. In fact, the planet rotates smoothly, its orientation to the sun shifting constantly. To experience it in real time, one has to be watching a sunset or, much better, a total eclipse of the sun. Instead, we rely on devices to tell us what numbers go with any given moment in time. Once a year, those numbers click over to a new year. The fact that our Julian calendar new year comes a week after the winter solstice, and has no relationship whatsoever to planting or harvest cycles, just underlines the arbitrariness of celebrating a shift of digits in the naming of the year. And yet we celebrate with great abandon. Two nights ago, Amy and I attended a conc...