Happy New Year 2015

Do you ever wonder why as we get older the years seem to slip by faster and faster. I don’t know, it just seems to me that when I was much younger, it seemed to take forever for Christmas and New Years to arrive. Maybe it was just when we are young it was difficult for us to have a concept of time, and as we age, time becomes much more important in our lives.

We are all “programmed” by the “Time Beast” from the first day we go to school, and maybe it even begins before that. Time to get up and dressed for school. Time to study for the big mathematics test tomorrow. Time to eat dinner (when I was young the family sat down together at the dinner table. Have we forgotten how to do that?). Time to graduate and move on to the working world where we are looked at, measured, and controlled by the “time clock”.

The result of this is we learn to measure our existence in bits and bytes of days, weeks, months and years. And so we rush thru the week to get to the weekend. We save up our time in terms of vacation days for the yearly family trip to the shore. It is not that time moves faster, it is just that our awareness of the passage of time becomes more intense.

Christmas still comes around every 365 days. New Years comes once a year, just like clockwork. What do we do with all that time between January 1 and December 31? As a child it was easy. Winter snow games led to Spring with discovery of life reborn. Summer is outdoor play time and that leads to Fall when the world’s color begins to change. As children our passage of time was marked by the passage of the seasons. As adults we also mark the passage of time but instead of the wonder of the seasons, we measure the impact of the seasons.

Winter brings cold weather, snow to shovel, and rain. When spring arrives it becomes too easy to miss the rebirth of the earth as the colors of life begin to bloom and we become overwhelmed with cleaning up after the winter months. Summertime.. too hot… too humid… too summer. And then there is the Fall, with raking leaves, putting up the shutters, and the approach of the holidays.

Today is New Years Day 2015. Before we again realize it October will be upon us and just like this year the Christmas decorations will once again appear in the stores. Today is filled with New Year’s Resolutions that often time never see the light of day. Today is filled with the starting the dreaded diet, as we sit down at the family table to feast. And today is filled with the feeling of a new beginning; after all it is a New Year.

Every year on New Years Eve as the fireworks were going off, my mother would open the front door and sweep out the old year ushering in the New Year. It is a good idea. The old is behind us and we are entering into a new year. 2014 is a thing of the past. Some day it will be a benchmark in the future generations history books. 2015 is here, and time forever marches on.

“If I don’t have time to live my life well the first time, when am I going to find the time to go back and live it over?” ― Robert Fulghum, Uh-Oh