Happy New Year

Like a lot of stuff, New Year’s Day is the invention of humans, not some immutable fact of the universe.  We do revolve around the sun in a year, 365 days or so.  You might think we are back where we started in our orbit a year ago.  But many things have changed; our orbit varies sightly every year; the entire solar system is sliding through space as it whirls around the galactic center, shifting slightly as the various gravitational forces affect us; the galaxy likewise has a relative motion within our local galactic cluster and that cluster has relative motion to our neighborhood in the universe and the whole universe is apparently gradually flying apart.

Things change in our individual lives and our course as the collective human species.  Some change for the better, some for the worse, but the change is always there, always occurring.  Some change we embrace, some we resist, but it will come.  And once a year we reflect on the change from the past year, and we imagine what change might occur in the coming one.  Will it be better?  Will the good outweigh the inevitable bad?  Hefty questions.

So who can blame us puny humans on our tiny irrelevant speck of dust in the vast universe if we just ignore all that and try to make our little corner of Earth somewhat comfortable to us, try to get by day to day to day with maybe some happiness, but hopefully no pain, despair, anxiety.  And create our celebrations to bring us together and produce that happiness we crave.  Or maybe we aren’t so irrelevant.  Maybe we are a rare eruption of self-consciousness and intelligence in a universe driven by cold mathematical laws.  Maybe if we hold it together long enough we will discover and create incredible things, maybe we will find ways to control and modify those seemingly eternal and unchanging laws.

Whatever you believe and however you approach life, I hope you truly have a meaningful and productive 2025, and find as much happiness, contentment, satisfaction with achievement and pleasure in family and friends as possible.