What Time Is It?

When the lights flickered this afternoon in Nordstrom’s, the Persian woman waiting on me told me how the lights had gone off last week during her dinner party. “It was our New Year,” she said, “so I had quite a job to make a celebration with no electricity.”

This reminded me Persians celebrate Nowruz, which means “new light”, on the vernal equinox. For them the rebirth of spring is the start of the year. They seem to be at the end of a long parade of New Years that seems to start with the Hebrews who were once their neighbors. Jews use the new moon of autumn harvest time for their Rosh Hashonah, which means head or start of the year. Because it's lunar, the date fluctuates from early September to October. Maal Hijra, as Islam's New Year is sometimes called, migrates on our calendar because the Muslim lunar year is 11 days shorter than our Christian solar one. Right now it's working its way backwards through November.

The Chinese have an altogether different lunar imagining, and call their New Year “spring festival” for it marks the end of winter in our February much like Lenten Carnival. The Indians have no agreed turn of the year but instead celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights in the fading days of autumn, and Holi, a literally colorful and chaotic rite of spring that usually takes place in March.

So, the truth is that nobody really knows when a year begins. Or how many months it has. Whether it starts when the harvest is in and life is secured as Hebrew rabbis thought or when the harvest is put in and the seed begins to sprout as the Chinese think. Whether it should be determined by rotations around the sun or proximity to the moon or some combination of both. Or why with us it’s January 1 and not on the December solstice like Christmas is supposed to be, marking the return of light.

All these conflicting ideas of how to calculate the passing days just goes to show that time is no sure thing. It's really whatever we imagine it to be and nothing fixed or guaranteed or substantial. My tomorrow is today in Japan, my summer is fall in Buenas Aires. My New Year’s moment in San Francisco is three hours after the ball falls in Times Square, New York. So when and where is it, the new year?

Mine may not be yours but it is not more right or wrong. We all have our own way of seeing things. That's exactly what the Buddha said: each of us lives in a world of our own making. And what we make of New Year celebrations is a shining example of emptiness, the timeless Buddhist teaching. All our hoopla and ado about somebody else's nothing is a great way to understand what that really means.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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