It is night, and quiet. I am at home, typing while reminiscing. Tonight, is New Year's Eve, and tomorrow - nay, in a little under 3 hours (local time), a new year will commence. Instead of 2016, we will be dating all our documents as 2017. I sit, type and remember what I have done in such nights in the past years.
Last year, I was a friend's house in the south of England. Half of the party was in the hot tub, while others like myself chose rather to curl up in the living room. I felt blessed and observant, as ever surprised at the choices we all have yet often don't realise. The Hot Tub New Year's had come up suddenly, and I had decided to join these people whose hearts I knew but their lives a bit less so. The First Day of the Year saw us walking to the sea in gusty wind and smattering rain, joyous and full of life.
Other years, I have spent the celebration with other friends at other parties, other homes, other countries. Once, I was in Vienna for the fabulous Silvesterkonzert. There, we shared our tickets with an elderly couple who were celebrating long years together but had had no tickets. Another year, I was in a farm in a Welsh valley, quiet and in the single company of my then partner. Often, back in the day, I would stay in with family, have a meal and go to bed after seeing the change on TV.
The places and company have changed; the celebrations too - I haven't had the Spanish traditional 12 grapes for luck in a while, for example; and the gatherings I have been to range from quiet 'friends and family' parties, to pub bashes, to sleepovers, to the humongous last free New Year's on the Embankment in London. Now, today, in Israel, it is the quiet of home to heal my throat.
What really makes me think is the need to celebrate, year after year, the change in the calendar.
I get the need to mark time, to celebrate stages in the wheel of the year. However, unlike Pagan Sabbaths (for example) which are linked to major lunar or natural events, the Georgian calendar we celebrate now, the one with numbers, is rather... random. Why today, why at midnight? Why do we have 365/366 day years, why 7-day weeks, why 24 hour days? And yet, the expectation feels us with both the thrill of anticipation, and the dread of mortality. We feel bad, we vow to change, we join to eat, drink, dance; exult in excesses; relish the madness of the fallacy of turning the page.
It's this conflicting awareness that keeps me interested, if I'm honest. This collective, world-wide agreement to unite in joy while closing a cycle. The agreement that it matters, that it has power, that we are somehow defined by the number on the date. Because, after all, and like they say in Hebrew, תמיד יש סיבה למסיבה (There's always a reason to party), and that's what really matters. And because closing a year means a new one, brand new and mistake free, is up for us to play in, mess up in, hopefully grow in. And, most importantly, because it's the chance to love, laugh, live.
Blessings for the next 365 days, my dears! May the abstract of 2017 be a true blank canvas, and may you be brave and paint it in bold colours to create a life whose experience you love. Into the New Year we go!
