The illusion of a new year
If you are reading this at about fore noon on Sunday, January 1, 2017, my safe guess is that you have pulled through the celebratory ritual. You have eaten the special meal of the day: rice and chicken or rice and turkey or rice and goat meat; or pounded yam with egusi soup. You probably […]
If you are reading this at about fore noon on Sunday, January 1, 2017, my safe guess is that you have pulled through the celebratory ritual. You have eaten the special meal of the day: rice and chicken or rice and turkey or rice and goat meat; or pounded yam with egusi soup. You probably had wine or a criminally cold beer to welcome the new year.
As you relax and pick your teeth after the sumptuous meal, your mind flits uncontrollably from yesterday to today. Yesterday was 2016. Today is 2017. Yesterday was probably your best year; the year you realised what you did not even dream of. Or, it was your worst year; the year of your failures and disappointments and worst nightmares. Your sweet dreams went sour. You remember 2016 with either special gratitude to the deity you worship or you entertain some doubts about the capacity of the deity to stop your enemies from crossing the Red Sea in pursuit of you.
You give today special welcome because 2017 promises something new. It could be the year President Buhari remembers you and gives you a juicy political appointment. Nothing beats the ranks of the movers and shakers of the society.
Look around you. It is the new year but does anything look new? Your aching back and arthritic knees were not left behind in 2016. They are still with you, giving you the same pains they gave you in 2016; the recession is still here, softening the Naira against almost all other foreign currencies. NEPA is as romantically epileptic today as it was yesterday.
So, what is new in the new year?
Nothing. We welcome the new year by the force of Illusion. A new year does not really exist. The illusion of the new year ritual makes sense only in the context of helping us to understand why there is something called aging. The leaves turn brown on the branches and fall off. Wrinkles ravage us, reminding us that Christmas marks a milestone on the calendar in the time allotted each one of us by the creator. Your wrinkles won’t let you forget that – unless you refuse to look in the mirror.
The illusion of a new year is the peg on which we hang our hopes in the inevitability of tomorrow. Tomorrow itself is an illusion hinged on the belief that every 24 hours is a renewal. If President Buhari gives you a juicy appointment tomorrow, you will certainly see it as the divine blessing in the new year. You would not accept the appointment as something decided in 2016 but delayed until 2017. To do so would make the promises of the new year ring rather hollow as far as you are concerned.
If you look into it even casually, you cannot but notice that the new year is essentially a religious ritual. The Gregorian calendar is Christian. It dates from the assumed date of the birth of Jesus Christ. A slight diversion. By the way, if Jesus had been dead for more than 2,000 years then he is remiss or tardy in his promise to return soon and gather the sheep unto himself. I thought the mansions for the righteous must be ready by now. The Gregorian calendar is unique because all its 12 months were decided on arbitrarily. The experts calculated there must be 365 days in a year; or 366 every fourth year known as leap. They then created the months and assigned a specific number of day to each. They eliminated the 13th moon.
The Islamic calendar is based on the movement of the moon and known as lunar calendar. It dates back to the night of Hijira when the Prophet and his followers escaped from Mecca to Medina. This is the 1438th year in the Islamic lunar calendar, way behind the Gregorian calendar.
There are 13 moons in the lunar calendar. Seems closer to divine mathematics than the Gregorian calendar. The lunar is the calendar known to farmers, hunters and fishermen.
The Chinese have their own calendar. It assigns each year to an animal or a bird. I am not eager to meet a Chinese born in the year of the snake or the monkey. The Hindus and the Buddhists have their own respective calendars too. It should be easy for us to appreciate this: this multitude of calendars and new years is a recipe for chaos in heaven as well as on earth. A new year promise by one deity could be nullified by another deity. An armed robber fortified by a babalawo with the promise of his invincibility could be brought down by another deity that loves the armed robber less and the society more. It could lead to a clash of powers.
The Gregorian calendar has more or less imposed itself on the world as the universal calendar. It is not. Its loud and ritualistic celebration of the new year on the first of January each year; still it gives us but the illusion of old time a new time. I am intrigued by the fact that each men and women have actually have multiple birthdays if we go by these various calendars. My date of birth on the Gregorian calendar would differ markedly from the same date on the Islamic lunar calendar or the Chinese calendar. Who knows I might have been born in the year of the tortoise. It beats being born in the year of the monkey, I tell you.
Well wishes wash over us each year. We exchange mutual goodwill messages and fond prayers for the new year. It is a ritual now cast in stone. It does not change my argument that a new year is a product of our illusion. It exists only in so far as man needs a unit of measurement of time from the cradle to the grave.
Happy new year.