Ain't it funny how time slips away?!

Well, New Year's Day has come and gone, and 2015 is now past. As with many of the years as we have grown older, the past year flashed by for me. Like big Nate in the cartoon Overboard, I often try to hold on to each passing season as long as I can, and especially to resist the onslaught of the unwelcome chills of winter. I have also been hanging on to being 75 years old for as long as possible; but by the time you are reading this, my time as a 75-year-old will be a thing of the past. When I was a young boy, 75 was really old. Now, I want to think 90 is the new 75! Each year in January, I have a brief five days in which I am three years older than my brother Ben. I was born on the 4th, and just over two years later he was born on the 9th. That used to mean that my status as the older brother was even more impressive for five days. Now, I'm not sure what it means.

Maybe I'd just like to slow down the passing of time. But I have discovered that slowing down the passage of time is very hard to do. I don't claim to understand everything that Mr. Einstein said, but as I understand it, he said that if you could travel at almost the speed of light, time would slow down for you. None of my vehicles has ever been able to get close to the speed of light, and neither have even the jet airplanes I have traveled on, so I have just about resigned myself to never being able to slow down the passage of time.

Time seems to march steadily on, with year following upon year with a kind of irresistible inevitability. But the experience of the various dimensions of time can be a mystery. For example, when you are waiting for your doctor's appointment, and the doctor is late, every minute passes in slow motion, and even the seconds drag on and on. An hour turns interminable, like never-ending. Some days seem to go on and on forever, especially when everything is going wrong for us, and we lament, will this day never end? But, even when the hours and minutes and days wear slowly on, our years have a way of slipping away from us, and we wonder where did the time go? I am reminded of a song from years ago, "Gee, ain't it funny, how time slips away?!"

In one way, New Year's Day seems to me kind of a pointless day to celebrate. I especially have never seen the point of celebrating the New Year by partying and drinking and coming out of the whole thing headachy and nauseous. You could say it's just a day when the earth has sailed around the sun and arrived again at the point in its orbit that is the same as a year ago. And, who is to say that that is the point in the orbit where the year really begins? That's the thinking of the Scrooge-like creature in me. The rest of me thinks another way. The rest of me likes the idea of celebrating special days of the year, like Thanksgiving, and Advent, and Christmas, and New Year's, and Easter, and Pentecost. Special days, and celebrations of special days, have a way of reminding us of things that are really important in life, and of refreshing our attitudes and our outlook on life.

I think I would rather have those special days, even those regular, recurring days, rather than living a life in which every day was just another day. What if we didn't have years to mark beginnings? no months to cycle through? no differentiated weeks? no designations for days of the week like Monday or Thursday? What if we just called each day Day No. 222, or Day No. 229, or Day No. 5, 317? Of course, just having a New Year's party, with nothing much to celebrate other than a bit of short-term hilarity, still seems pretty pointless to me. I still don't get very excited about joining the thousands of people gathered in Times Square in New York to watch the ball drop! I think I could get just as excited by the mayor of a small city who started a tradition of having a Llama cross over a bridge in his town. Or, we could all just draw a line on the ground and jump over it into the New Year!

I think nature suggests to us in several ways that the passing of time needs to be marked, with times of new beginnings, with intervals by which we remember significant happenings which stand out meaningfully for us. Time passes like a fleeting point moving from past to present to future. leading us to think in terms of now, of times back then, and of times yet to come. But time also passes in cycles, with regularities which come around again and again. So, we think in terms of seasons, and tasks and pursuits to fit each season. The passing of a year seems like a natural time to weigh the values we have experienced during the past year, what has been good, what has been bad, what successes we have enjoyed, what we may learn from certain failures and problems we met along the way.

The opening of a New Year also seems like a natural time for new beginnings, a time for catching a vision of better things which we can coax into being, a time to refresh our belief in new possibilities for ourselves and the people we share the world with. We often laugh about the seeming futility of New Year's resolutions which quickly fail; but, really, what good and hopeful things ever happen without people forming new resolves? setting new goals? and believing in new possibilities?

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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Editorial on 01/06/2016