Happy Solar, Lunar, or Tropical New Year
Happy Solar, Lunar, or Tropical New Year
The Universal Urge to Celebrate Annual Cycles
Hauʻoli makahiki hou! Happy New Year to my readers and friends. For those of you who are subscribers, this greeting has been emailed to your inbox on New Years Eve, Reveillon, St Sylvesterʻs Day. Hence my topic for this post. And if you have not yet subscribed, but would like to have next weekʻs essay emailed to you, here is the link to take care of that bit of housekeeping. You donʻt have to pay to subscribe!
The end of our Gregorian calendar year plays a recurring role in the episodes of memoir I wrote here on Substack this past year. The stage was set by the Four Things I Always Wanted to Do , a list I made on New Years Day 1990 in lieu of resolutions, while with my BFF and her family on holiday in sunny Mexico a few weeks after my divorce from my first husband became final. In the years covered by the memoir, I spent two New Yearʻs eves jumping seven waves on beaches in Brazil before transferring my tropical New Year celebrations to Hawaiʻi. If Iʻd written through another couple of years, we could have huddled together in anticipation of whether all the worldʻs infrastructure would collapse as computer systems melted down over Y2K. So many different ways to approach the turn of a year or a millennium.
The Brazilian “seven waves” tradition is from the Yoruba culture, but in Africa the Yoruba new year begins in June, not January (I got curious and looked it up). Here in Hawaiʻi, according to the traditional Hawaiian lunar calendar, the new year begins when the constellation Makaliʻi (Pleides) rises over the horizon at sunset in late October/early November. That does not mean everyone here understands and celebrates the Makahiki season; most New Yearʻs greetings with that word go out this week. And in my neighborhood, the fireworks have been going off for several days, apparently folks feeling the need to practice as December 31 approaches. A friend whose ancestry is Hawaiian-Chinese-European claims her heritage entitles her to an annual new year period of three or four months, from the rising of Makaliʻi to the second new moon following the solstice. Thatʻs a lot of imu and fireworks!
Or consider India - a country of diversity which threads through my memoir as my trip to Tibet begins in Sikkim and the period about which I wrote ends with an appearance by the god Shiva . In India there are so many choices. The date the new year begins depends on whether the ethnic group of a region uses a lunar, solar, or lunisolar calendar - and I was pleased to discover that in some regions it falls around my birthday in April. If I started with the Jewish New Year holiday of Rosh Hashanah, I could legitimately celebrate a six-month succession of “new years” with friends of various faiths and ethnicities, announcing my new intentions and starting over every few weeks!
Even those of us who are faithful in celebrating the traditional new year of our heritage still have work, school, and tax calendars tied to the solar, Gregorian calendar. We engage in the various rituals around the approach of December 31st, from buying fireworks and traveling to visit family, to closing accounting books and hanging a new calendar on the wall. Whether I have pulled a puffy down jacket over my gown to watch the ball drop in Times Square, or joined the throngs on the beach in Rio de Janeiro barefoot in a thin sleeveless white cotton dress or lifted a glass of bubbly quietly at home, I always feel happy joining in the moment of collective joy at the birth of a new year with all it promises for fresh starts and ambitious resolutions. I love that we are an optimistic species.
One of the required rituals I observe is the annual writing of a business plan including a set of personal goals. Sometimes I am asked to give workshops on this. I feel ambivalent about another approach advised by personal and business coaches these days, the picking of a “word” to set your theme for the coming year. You can imagine my agony over choosing just one word! Iʻm not making fun of this, not entirely. As my memoir attests, I am a great believer in the power of writing down oneʻs intentions and goals. I am also a great believer in the power of regular reflection - less to judge (which I am oh so prone to and good at), more to just be in gratitude for whatever I can, and to search for lessons when gratitude is not the unbidden emotion that fills the heart and body along with a particular memory. I try to focus on the moments in which I felt most alive, most in the flow, most conscious of purpose and connection, to provide hints of what I should expand and extend into the new year.
I also find tremendous value in simply acknowledging the fullness of seasons and cycles, within each year and over longer periods of our human lives. There is more to life than todayʻs beginning and ending moment.
With all these words, what I am trying to say is: the December 31/January 1 dates are arbitrary so feel free to do it differently this year, skip the resolutions and review if it feels burdensome now, there are so many choices! Pick a different place to start. Any date that works for you will do. Your birthday. Your saintʻs day. Beltane.
If I had to pick my own personal alternative new year day, it would be the Solstice - since I live in the northern hemisphere, the Winter Solstice is the one I would choose.
Unlike an arbitrary date for which I need a calendar, the shortening and lengthening of days, the movement of the sunrise to the south, these things are experiential and impersonal. For example, although my Arabian mare is bred for the desert and lives in a tropical climate, every year her coat gets fluffy as the days get shorter. Today, only a week into the opposite cycle of lengthening days, the curry comb filled with hair as I brushed her. The nights are as cold as they will likely get - but the slight bit of additional daylight signals her metabolism that warmer days are ahead. It makes intuitive sense to me to mark the yearʻs cycles as Nature does, as animals and plants do, rather than in accordance with a decree by Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.
When I still myself enough in the busy-ness of this time of year to notice, I recognize that something also shifts in me, in my animal body, as days shorten and then lengthen. As December approaches, my mood gets quieter, my energy turns inward despite the full calendar of year-end holiday parties and fundraising events. When the sun finally appears just a minute or two earlier each morning, I feel the seeds of new growth, the urge to make changes. I might ask my hairdresser to give me bangs this week, for the first time since I was age 12 or so. I might make a trip to New York City - maybe in time to see the first blossoms of spring and meet an infant soon to be born, my oldest goddaughterʻs first child.
Maybe the issue is you donʻt like endings and beginnings at all! When it comes to those inevitable cycles, each of us has different preferences, zones of comfort, and innate strengths. Some of us are naturally good at beginnings, imagining the crackling fire that will warm our friends and family that evening, and then gathering fragrant wood and preparing a hearth with kindling and a generous stack of logs beside it. Some of us are at our best after the preparations are complete, taking the first tiny spark and fanning it into a roaring blaze, feeding just the right amount of fuel at the right moment, calling friends to gather. Some of us are tenders, patient with the sustaining of a fire, an initiative, a family, a business. And some of us have a gift for closure - gently stirring the last embers and watching their glow fade, thoughtfully lending our care and presence to the ending of an evening and a fire.
Do you recognize your own pattern of energy and creation? If you know me in real life, you know Iʻm naturally good at generating ideas and enthusiasm for them. I am also surprisingly fearless at designing and implementing a dignified ending for an organization, or accompanying the last breaths of a life. On the other hand, I have had to learn tactics and discipline to be even minimally competent at the parts in between - including the awareness to recognize othersʻ gifts, inviting and allowing them to feed and tend what my energy got started, taking joy in the skills and success of others.
Each role is a contribution to the whole. A herd of horses, a school of dolphins. They make no accounting for the year, award no prizes for their accomplishments. No measuring of the balance sheet versus projections, no setting of stretch goals and targets for next year. No bonuses are awarded. No tally of naughty or nice. No shame at resolutions unfulfilled followed by momentary promises to do it right next year, to finally join the gym or stop yelling at the kids or write handwritten notes to clients. They simply move with grace through the cycles, month to month, year after year, from birth to completion. We humans just make things so damn complicated.
If endings and beginnings are not your natural home in the cycle, if a Gregorian solar calendar year is not resonant with your natural rhythm, donʻt fret it. Wherever you find yourself in the cycles of your own life as this arbitrary date on the calendar approaches, thatʻs ok. Own it! Go ahead and tell everyone that you celebrate on February 10th or April 14th or only on leap years. Tell them your resolutions take twelve weeks or six years or fifteen lifetimes to achieve so no need to make them annually. Be generous in the kindness you show yourself, and bold in your declarations to others. They will all believe you, believe in you, when they feel that. Lead the way! Iʻm counting on you.