In Which Our Heroine Waxes Poetic Discussing The Nature Of Time and New Year Resolutions

"...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."

Albert Einstein

So here we are, once again at the end of a year. Humans, with a biological framework structuring our experience of time as linear, feel its passage and express the concept through our senses, behavior, expectations, and language - as this succint quotation explains better than I:

"In daily life we divide time into three parts: past, present, and future. The grammatical structure of language revolves around this fundamental distinction. Reality is associated with the present moment. The past we think of having slipped out of existence, whereas the future is even more shadowy, its details still unformed. In this simple picture, the "now" of our conscious awareness glides steadily onward, transforming events that were once in the unformed future into the concrete but fleeting reality of the present, and thence relegating them to the fixed past." --Paul Davies, "That Mysterious Flow".

At the beginning of the 21st century, we are surrounded not only by clocks ticking away seconds, minutes, hours, days, but by our modern sense of seasonal time, measured not as our ancestors through the waxing and waning of the moon and the earth-based cycle of sowing, planting, harvest and fallow but through a rigid adherence to daily exigencies, our work week, fixed national holidays, and professional deadlines. We only step out of "our time" when we focus on timeless events such as a wedding, a baby's birth, a parent's funeral.

And at the end of the year, we find that we all long so much to improve our lives, and thereby prove to ourselves at least that the coming year will hold joy rather than tragedy, that the future will find us basking in much anticipated happiness. Therefore, we purposely plan ways in which we can make these wishes become true.

We resolve.

We resolve to lose weight, take more exercise, exert more control over our finances. We resolve to find a better job, or get a raise or promotion. We resolve to dress better or attend more closely to our grooming or our health.

Rarely do we resolve to have more fun, to work less, to travel more or spend more time with loved ones. We hardly ever resolve to read the classics, learn a new language, join in a cause to improve our surroundings or even to assign more of our discretionary dollars to charity.

The year to come is a marvelous thing, seen most clearly precisely in the waning moments of New Years Eve, a recognition that the new year is marvelous strictly in its potential, the sense that nothing hasn't happened yet, that the year is metaphorically fresh snow on which no human tracks have been made, with no grimy slush muddying its pristine beauty. Perhaps the concept of a virgin future, as noted by Einstein, is indeed merely a convincing illusion, albeit an illusion quite as convincing as Paul Davies' explanation of a fixed past and the fleeting awareness of the present.

The possibilities of the unknown, the surprises lying in wait in a life yet to be lived - for humans with bodies which for now remain powerless in the grip of linear time, although physicists are still hotly debating how time is structured in the universe - this is our annual chance to wrest free from the grip of what has been and concentrate on what is to be.

Regardless of which theory of time one believes, the whole point I think is the cherished structure of belief itself: hope does indeed spring eternal; dreams have a reality and only need us to clothe them and make them flesh; human achievement can indeed be limitless.

We can all resolve to discover the best in ourselves and by doing so, conquer our faults and transmute them, like the base metals of the alchemers of old, into purest gold.