On the Turning of the Year

Happy New Year!

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, in the days of auld lang syne?

By the time this reflection is published, most of us will have recovered from New Year’s celebrations. Young couples will have exchanged their midnight kisses; old couples will hold one another with eyes quietly glistening; and the lonely will pine for loves lost—or never found.

Have you ever paused, though, to consider the deeper meaning of that famed Scots poem and song, Auld Lang Syne?

At its core, Auld Lang Syne is about remembering shared history—acknowledging time passed and those who have passed with it, and honoring bonds that endured change, distance, and aging, without pretending that any of it did not matter. It is a ritual of recognition and remembrance, not celebration.

The version we know today was popularized by Robert Burns in the latter part of the eighteenth century, drawn from older folk material. It was neither a new composition nor written for the New Year, though it was later adopted by the holiday precisely because it fits the moment. The song is just as often called upon at funerals and farewells—rituals that mark continuity across separation.

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Marking Time

We instinctively mark time—birthdays, anniversaries, seasons, holidays; seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. It is simply our nature. While these divisions are certainly constructed, they are not cosmic truths. We impose structure in order to orient ourselves; beginnings, endings, and thresholds give shape to experience and allow us to recognize movement and change. Without such markers, reflection itself becomes indefinite, perpetually postponed rather than meaningfully engaged.

It is worth noting, however, that these markers are often arbitrary in their particulars. There is nothing intrinsically unique about January 1. The year does not reset, nor does time pause. Marking the new year is simply one way of ordering life—and the pursuit of order is a noble one, though it can become self-limiting if mistaken for reality itself.

Thresholds help differentiate the otherwise unbroken stream of life. Cycles and boundaries allow us to engage in retrospection, to distinguish gain from loss, growth from stagnation. They also enable planning, goal-setting, and the recognition of milestones. In short, cycles and boundaries give us a sense of forward and backward, anchoring both personal and cultural evolution within the flow of time.

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The Grand Illusion

The new year is a convenient marker—a time to ponder the previous year and to look toward the next. It couples a sense of finality with the promise of new beginnings, and in that combination there is something genuinely hopeful.

It is also, in a sense, an illusion—though not a malicious one!

We tend to believe we inhabit a detailed, continuous world. We experience the present as a seamless culmination of past moments, with the future trailing just ahead as possibility. Yet our actual experience is far sparser and more selective. Much of what we perceive is constructed, filled in, inferred—an interface rather than a full accounting.

This is where marking time limits rather than liberates. When we mistake these markers for truth itself, we bind our sense of meaning to arbitrary thresholds—waiting for permission to reflect, to begin, or to hope.

Recognizing the illusion does not empty the world of meaning; it expands it. Freed from the need to locate significance at prescribed moments, we are no longer confined to cycles of our own making. Reflection need not wait for January. Hope need not arrive at midnight. The world, once uncompressed, proves far larger—and more available—than our calendars suggest.

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Drawing Outside the Lines

The lesson of the turning of the year is not that life resets, but that there is always a tomorrow. Not as an excuse to procrastinate, but as an invitation to hope. That may be one of our most human qualities. The calendar offers a pause, and once we recognize it as such, we are no longer bound to wait for sanctioned moments to live deliberately. Carpe diem—seize the day—ceases to be a slogan and becomes a quiet orientation, a light in the long tunnel.

Introspection does not belong to a season, nor does repair—of self, of relationship, or of harm done. Acts of generosity are no less meaningful in July than in December, and gratitude is neither diminished nor amplified by the date on the page. Our traditions give names to these movements of the soul—repentance, generosity, gratitude, restoration—but the movements themselves are universal. They are not owned by any calendar, creed, or threshold.

The new year serves as a reminder; that is its gift. But life itself is not parceled out in such tidy divisions, nor is meaning rationed by the clock. When this is recognized, the illusion loosens its grip, freeing us to engage the world with greater depth—not because the calendar tells us it is time, but simply because it is.

And so, as one year gives way to the next, perhaps the truest gesture is not resolution or reinvention, but remembrance: a quiet recognition of where we have been, who we have known, and what has carried us this far. If nothing else, may we yet share a cup of kindness—for the sake of times long past, and for the days now unfolding.