The Unfashionable Close of Year Post.

Future is the PastIt’s the end of the Julian Calendar year 2017, and the beginning of the Julian Calendar year 2018 is about to begin. Fashionable posts about the good and bad of 2017 will mire the Internet, and there will be a lot of positive things written about 2018.

This is an unfashionable post. It even says so in the title.

Culturally, we adhere to a calendar that was started in 46 BC by Julius Caesar, a throwback to a long dead Roman Empire that was once great but is decidedly now as great as the number of people who speak Latin natively. Yet we still use that calendar which we have hacked for leap years.

People promise themselves that they will magically transform themselves into people that they will be happier with – maybe quitting something, maybe losing weight, maybe sticking their thumbs in their belt and saying, “This year will be different!” There is a value to that, but that value can be found in any arbitrary date. That this is true is easy to see in how people find their own small and large successes throughout the Julian calendar.

In dealing with agriculture, I can tell you that no plants celebrate these holidays. In fact, no other species celebrates these holidays. I suppose, paraphrasing Twain, no other species needs  to. I’m not sure why we need to. Since I became of legal age to do anything I couldn’t legally do underage, I haven’t really seen the point. Drink on a birthday? I can do that any day. Eat cake? Any day.

So whatever it is that you think you’re going to do in the New Year that is going to be so awesome – you could have started yesterday, a month ago, a year ago – and you can probably still do in any month in the future, on any day.

You can be a better person any day. Why do you need a New Year to do it?