A brief on time and new years

People always look at a new year as the start of another period and hope for better events and conditions in the coming 365 days. But why only for the next 365 days and not for 500 or 600 days? This is because almost the whole world is now on the Gregorian calendar which set 24 hours as a day, 28 to 31 days as a month, and 365 to 366 days as a year. This has not always been the case, and there were other calendars before October 1582, the date when Pope Gregory decreed the adoption of the Gregorian calendar for the Catholics.

The sheer superiority of this calendar was obvious that most other religions and civil society eventually shifted to the Gregorian calendar. The scientific bases of this calendar are; the Earth’s rotation on its axis which is 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 4 seconds, the moon’s revolution around the earth every 27.32 to 29.53 days, and the Earth’s revolution around the sun at 365.26 days.

The leap years and the time adjustments by Greenwich Mean Time take care of the fractions. This makes a year a good measure to track mankind’s progress over time, and the beginning of every year as a good reckoning point to look back on what we have done, and to plan for the coming year.

Time is the indefinite continuous progress of existence and events that occur in irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. Like a stream of water going down, it keeps moving forward and never goes back. So different people and different situations make for varying perceptions of time.

For the millennials and the Z Generation, 2019 is just the beginning of a whole lifetime to live, for the Baby Boomers it is the transition to growing old. If one is 60 years old, it means one has lived more years than what may be remaining even if one lives to be 100 years old. On the other hand, it would also mean that one’s achievement over the years that he has lived have been significant and was a life well-lived.

Another perception of time worth pondering is the significance or insignificance of our time here on earth. 2019 is approximately 2,019 years Anno Domini (AD), which means that many years from the “Year of the Lord.” But there were thousands or millions of years “Before Christ” (BC).

If we believe that God created the world during the “Big Bang”, then the Earth is 15 billion years old. In this context 2,000 years is insignificant and whatever happens in a year is really nothing. The political, social, economic, and other problems in our country and in the world, no one will remember in 10,000 years. And true enough, our recorded history only goes back 4,000 years. As the saying goes, “In the light of eternity (10,000 years at least), you and what you do doesn’t really matter.” On the other hand, precisely because of our limited lifespan, everything matters within that period. We have to make the best of the time allotted to improve ourselves and the world for those who will come after us. As with most religions, we are here for a purpose and more so if we believe in a life after death.

In Stephen Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time” an intriguing theory is that time slows down as speed approaches the speed of light. So theoretically if one travels faster than the speed light, time would move backwards. A black hole, which is a collapsing star which sucks everything faster than the speed of light, will theoretically move to another time dimension. So, time has no beginning and no end, like God said in the Bible.