Crossing Over to Next Year

If you think the way I do, then probably it has crossed your mind what the significance is of the journey from the end of the current year (which is usually referred to as “last” year) to the beginning of the new (or “next”) year.  To many, this has always been a mystery.  To me, it’s as mysterious as you want it to be.

For example, every year, toward year’s end, you make a list of what you’d want to do in the coming year, which you call your new year’s resolutions (frequently, very lengthy list) and you have high hopes that you would achieve them.  There are two ways of looking at this, though: one, you shall have changed everything the following morning (that’s New Year’s Day); or, two, you shall have to achieve the changes you have in mind the next 360 days.  Your performance on the first day of the New Year is usually a good indicator of your potential success in achieving your New Year’s Resolutions.  At the end of the year, for many of us, the rating would be “nil” and it would be time to make a new list of new year’s resolutions that will suffer the same fate next time around.  

Costume competition during the UPOU Annual General Assembly and Christmas Party on December 13th.  As usual, everybody won in that competition.

So why are we so gung-hoish about the cross over from the last day of the year to the first day of the next, as if everything would be completely different?  We have various phrases to describe such conditions: turning a new leaf or a reformed person, for instance.  In the last so many years of your existence in this world, has this ever happened?  Probably no, but it does give us another time (the next New Year) to talk about new year’s resolutions , turning new leaves, or achieving individual reformation overnight.                                               
                                                                                                            

Perhaps one of the most powerful concepts ever thought of by man is the concept of the New Year and the accompanying belief that change comes with the New Year … this really hasn’t and probably won’t ever work.  What has been a common yardstick against which the crossover from end of the year to start of the new year has been measured quite accurately?  The quick answer is: the medical yardstick.  Perhaps your cholesterol, blood sugar, sgpt, liver fat and salt levels have risen, and may be your over-all health has deteriorated mainly because of the food you’ve enjoyed and consumed over the last few days..  But, that’s being too negativistic.  Let’s think positive.

                                One of the lunch dishes Jegs and I enjoyed with my sis-in-law, Ruby, and her
                                       daughter, Nyelle, at their residence in Sta. Rosa on Christmas Day.  Ruby
                                       prepared Japanese Maki and Jegs brought this simply-cooked prawns.  We had
                                       a good lunch.
                      

Of all the concepts ever invented by man, perhaps this cross over from the “old” to the “new” year is the most powerful.  It gives the individual unlimited hope that things will change for the better, no matter that the boundary is just a split second, at midnight, while people are enjoying to the hilt and carrying over to the next year all their bad habits during the old year.   

But, hey, may be you look at it differently.  If that’s the case, then, have a Prosperous New Year!