The end is near?

I imagine, since we’re only a week or two away from the New Year.

Sounds rather dramatic though doesn’t it?

(Cue foreboding music) THE END IS NEAR!

What does a New Year mean anyway outside of the changing of the calendar, the marking of days? Do we wake up New Years Day to a new and suddenly different world?

I think not.

Depending on what we did the night before, we wake up either at the start of another day or with a terrific hangover if we’ve overdone it. Not much else happens really on New Years Day when you think about it. People are just bracing themselves to get back to work, having made it through another holiday season.

Oh, I guess it means stores will be putting up decorations in the next week or so for Valentines Day but outside of that, what else?

Over the next week or so, they’ll be lots of retrospectives about the year just passed on TV and in Newspapers. Lists of events that happened, people who died, those kind of things. It’s this onus that we burden ourselves with, a forced reflection due to a change in the calendar. In the coming weeks they’ll be talk about whether or not it was a good shopping season for retailers and then we’ll quickly move on.

I don’t like the calendar, never have. Calendars, clocks, all these human inventions to try and enforce a rigid structure to the world around us, are just off-putting. They force us to approach life in a very different way and I don’t know if it’s a good way. For example, did you know that:

On November 18, 1883, four standard time zones for the continental U.S.A. were introduced at the instigation of the railroads. At noon on this day the U.S. Naval Observatory changed its telegraphic signals to correspond to the change. Until the invention of the railway, it took such a long time to get from one place to another that local “sun time” could be used. When traveling to the east or to the west, a person would have to change his or her watch by one minute every twelve miles.

When people began traveling by train, sometimes hundreds of miles in a day, the calculation of time became a serious problem. Operators of the new railroad lines realized that a new time plan was needed in order to offer a uniform train schedule for departures and arrivals.

Since every city was using a different time standard, there were over 300 local sun times to choose from. The railroad managers tried to address the problem by establishing 100 railroad time zones, but this was only a partial solution to the problem.

Imagine that!

Sun time. Can you think of how different life would be if based around Sun time? All those late nights at the job - do they still happen when you’re on Sun time? Thing is, we’re not talking about such a long time ago, a mere 122 years. This is the world my grandparents were born into. A world were Sun time was becoming a thing of the past and the world was entering the brave new frontier of “Time Zones.”

The pace of life is speeding up, getting faster and faster as the world becomes a smaller and smaller place. Does this mean one day, instead of the four time zones our country straddles, it will become sixteen time zones because having time zones of an hour will be a value far too large to use as a measure in such a fast-paced world.

I shudder at the thought.

If you focus so much energy on measuring something, of keeping track of it, are you able to enjoy it?

So, as the calendar turns over once again like an odometer on our lives, let’s take a moment to try and downplay its significance. Not that I don't think everyone shouldn't have the most wonderful holiday imaginable, just let’s try to move the focus away from the structure we try to impose on the world. We might all be a bit better for it.

More on time and its history can be found here.