We make too much of dates: “New Years”, anniversaries, birthdays. For some reason, people the world over seem to think that if something happened a year ago, or ten, or a thousand, then the latest little tick on the man-made calendar has some genuine connection. And astrologers–hoo, boy; through some arcane formulae based on the time and date of someone’s birth, they claim to be able to make pronouncements on that person’s fate which are as significant as they are vague. For money; lot’s of money.
This is New Years Day, when Westerners–and those who do business with the West–point back and say “that was then”, then forward and say “that’s later”. But that can be said about every second, every instance in time. What makes this day so meaningful? Convention, nothing else. And while most folks will say “AD”, referring in a dead language to a dead guy’s birthday–another overly-observed anniversary–the year of that alleged birth cannot be fixed by scholars, believers or skeptics, within a span of about a decade, from 7 “BC” to 3 “AD”. Seems kind of silly to me to put so much store in it.
And what of 1492, the year that a Genoese navigator found what he thought were a series of islands which were actually thousands of miles further on? Even that confused accomplishment is now shown to be of little real meaning: Columbus was not the first European to “find” the Americas–Vikings did it for sure a half-millennium earlier, and there is evidence that Irish monks may have done so far before than that. Indeed, some radical archaeologists claim to have found stone tools in the “New World” strongly suggestive of the form taken by early Frenchmen, pushing the discovery date back to 18,000 BC!
So I guess I’m saying, let’s not make so much of a twenty-four hour, or even a 365-day period of time. Remember, sure, if that’s your gig; but it’s what’s happening now that we might want to focus on.
