New Year

2012 ends tomorrow, and lacking anything better to do I've been taking stock of the year and thinking about things I want to keep or change for 2013. My friends and I do a little ritual around this time where we write down the things we want to be rid of for the new year and put them in a blue fire (epsom salts and rubbing alcohol). While it is cathartic to watch things like 'anxiety' burn to ashes, and it does help to remember the vision several hours later when sleep still hasn't come, I have to remind myself that this 'year-end' business is just as irrelevant as the 'world-end' nonsense was on December 21. We all laughed at the people who took it seriously, because it's not like the Western world has observed anything else in the Mayan calendar ever; but our calendar is equally arbitrary. December 31 and January 1 are just Monday and Tuesday this week, and in real time, unrelated to calendars, they are one and two planet-spins from now. We've assigned importance to these days based on the number of planet-spins that occur as the planet completes its revolution around the sun, and the months and days of the week were named by the Romans, which is pretty recently in the large scheme of the universe. So while it's great that people make resolutions about changes and think about things that didn't work in the past in order to do things differently in the future, in actuality you let go of things when you let go of them; things end when the end. I think I find this comforting because it's nicer to think of life as an unbroken line that ends when it ends, rather than a set of goals to reach in a certain amount of time. If we're all here in order to do the work we're doing, whatever it is, for however long we have, I'd hate to think of it being chopped up like that and marks being given for effort and achievement. With all of that said, at this time of year it's nice to remember that no one can make you happy but yourself, and the more you do things because they are expected of you the less they mean. If you do have to do things in order to get by, own them, so that they feel like choices and not obligations. That's the only way we take the helm in our own journeys.