What? Another new year?

Six weeks ago, we ushered in a new year. Now, another new year. Two months later, it will be a new year yet again, in the old country.

It is the new year in the Chinese calendar. The year of the horse.

Decades ago, when I lived in California, we were acquainted with a couple; the wife was originally from Hong Kong. When it was approaching the new year, I asked her how one might wish new year greetings in her old life in her old country. She wrote down on a piece of paper the phrase that she said out loudly: Gung hay fat choy.

Years later, here in Oregon, for a brief while we had quite, a few students from China at the university where I taught. I wished the student who worked in our office the phrase that I remembered from the California days. Gung hay fat choy, I told her. After acknowledging it, she replied that I was saying it the Catonese way. She then said something that sounded no different from what I thought I said.

I nodded my head and moved on fully aware that pronunciation is not my forte in any language.

It is also Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday.

And the beginning of Ramadaan.

We mark the passing of time in many ways.

Birthdays are our personalized new years.

Until I was laid off, my life was organized per the academic new year.

There is the tax year. Government fiscal budget year. Alcoholic Anonymous members even make sure to tell us about the anniversary of their sobriety.

We have a gazillion “new years” in a year. We note the completion of yet another revolution around the sun for the meanings that we seek, meanings that help us make sense of our existence.

According to Hindu philosophy, Kali Yuga is the fourth and final age in the cosmic cycle of time and we are 5128 years into it. Kali Yuga is the last of the four stages the world goes through as part of the cycle of Yugas, with each Yuga being progressively worse in terms of human conduct and spiritual awareness.

The authoritarian and his toadies certainly do epitomize the worsening of human conduct. If we had any doubts on whether this is the Kali Yuga, well, he has made sure that all doubts have been erased.

The end of the Kali Yuga will be characterized by floods, fires, and other natural disasters, it is believed. While the flood and fires and disasters all around us might seem like the end times, nope, the end of the Kali Yuga is not for a long time. The cosmic cycle will end after another 400,000-plus years. Who knows how many more Trumps will appear and die before the end, and how much the global temperature would have increased by then!

We mark time in so many ways. We keep time and contextualize the life that we lead. The passing of a day with the sunrise and sunset. The time it takes for the moon to become full again. The much longer time that it takes for the sun to seem to track the same arc again. Humans have been doing these for a long, long time.

Through most of my childhood, I don’t think we even wished each other a happy new year on January 1st. It was not anything special, other than the fact that we didn’t have school that day.

At home, there were plenty of high holy days that defined the passing of time. There were also birthdays and death anniversaries of us mortals. We did celebrate the Tamil New Year. When we were kids, we got a rupee each for the new year, which we thought was a huge deal.

Does it really matter how we keep time?

It does not.

After all, what we are measuring is the number of times earth goes around the sun. It has been far too many years of our home planet doing this iteration. Our minds cannot keep adding to the billions of years that have gone by, especially when our lives are so short that very few of us even live to be a hundred.

In order to keep track of a system that we can mentally understand and use, we need to arbitrarily create a starting point for the calendar, which is what we do in so many different ways.

So, it really does not matter if it is 5128 or 2026 or yet another year of the horse in our lifetime.

What really matters to me, and I hope it will to you too, is what we do during the finite time that we have here.

I say it is mission accomplished if we don’t go about intentionally harming other people and everything around us. Do no harm! Any good thing that we do above and beyond that is time well spent.

Gung hay fat choy!