By David Gallup
The New Year provides an opportunity to reflect on time,
which is a universal right. How time is celebrated and marked varies worldwide
yet impacts all world citizens.
Although many celebrate January 1st as the start
of the new year, Chinese celebrate the new year in late January or February, Iranians
celebrate in late March, Hindus celebrate in March or April, Buddhists
celebrate in April, Jews celebrate in September, Wiccans celebrate at the end
of October, and Muslims celebrate based on shifts in the lunar calendar.
When people celebrate the New Year depends upon the calendar
in use, which has varied over time, culture, religion and government. Some of
the almost 100 different calendars include the Egyptian, Solar, Lunar,
Yin-Yang, Mayan, Aztec, Hellenic, Roman, Julian, Celtic, Runic, and Gregorian. So
January 1st and all other New Year’s celebrations are a human
construct, a method of distinguishing how our lives fluctuate in comparison to
one another in the space-time continuum.
Why do we choose to celebrate a new year, to put a border on
part of our lives with a beginning and an end? Perhaps because we are alive for
an infinitesimal amount of time, we want to mark milestones of our survival. We
want to recognize the impact we world citizens have had on each other and the
world around us. We want to comprehend the preciousness of time and how far
humanity has progressed.
The universe moves at its own pace whether or not humans
notice how long it takes for the earth to orbit the sun. Though the universe
does what it will, we humans want a feeling of control. We celebrate the
passage of time, the arrival of a new day, a new year, and the appreciation of
what has gone and what is to come to have a sense of agency over how time
passes. Self-imposed limits, such as marking of time, provide an appearance of
structure, stability and security in an otherwise unpredictable world.
This recognition of time’s passing – the desire to track it,
mark it, measure it – and the feeling of being bound by it is
characteristically human, though not only human.
Like humans, our animal cohabitants of the earth also
instinctually perceive time. They feel its impact through their visual,
olfactory, auditory, gustatory, and tactile senses as well as through balance,
motion, and magnetism. Elephants, chimpanzees, dolphins, and magpies recognize
moments in time, such as “mourning” the loss of one of their tribe. Even plants
and bacteria can sense time through changes in light and internal biochemical
processes. An appreciation of the concept of time, and how it is used, is
important for all beings, and in particular, humans as world citizens
attempting to live together peacefully.
Human’s arrangement of time helps us to organize how we
behave and interact with each other and the world around us. Our memory
captures snippets of time, allowing us to repeat helpful events and actions and
to avoid harmful ones. Storytelling, writing and photography, distinctly human
capabilities, extend our memory, allowing us to travel through time. We can
visit the past, describe the present, or imagine the future. As
travelers-through-time, we can evolve as individuals, as humanity, and as part
of the universe. We are certainly time keepers. When we recognize our rights
and duties as world citizens, we can also be time givers.
Do we become older and
wiser over time? Does time give us second and third chances? Does time give
perspective?
The only time we can really change is now, how we use time
in the perpetual present. Every day provides an opportunity for living
anew. Every day is a moment to make each
other happy and to treat each other and the earth with respect.
Although time itself has no frontiers, we humans create borders
of time to add order to our lives together.
To maintain that order, however, as world citizens we know that we do
not need to separate one human from another by physical borders. In fact, we
all share time, and time is free, in the sense that time is available without
humans having to expend any energy to create it. We do need to spend energy in
how we choose to use our time. This is
where human-made borders, divvying up the earth, favors some humans over others.
Thus many people are deprived of their right to time.
How does our control of time empower some of us, and the
lack of control subjugate others of us?
If you are living at a subsistence level, all you can do is
spend your time working or looking for your next meal. Although we each have a duty
to use some of our time to help others and to improve our communities, we also
have the right to invest time in personal improvement and in enjoyment and
wonder of being alive.
This right to time is affirmed in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR):
Article 24 of the UDHR affirms the right to leisure – meaning
that we do not always need to use our time exercising our “right to work.”
Article 24 states, “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including
reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”
Article 27(1) of the UDHR provides another outlet for how we
may use time. It states, “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the
cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement
and its benefits.”
Article 30 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with
Disabilities also affirms the right to “participation in cultural life,
recreation, leisure and sport.”
These affirmations of our right to leisure, to uncontrolled
time, are another way of stating that work should not be the ultimate goal of
how we “spend” our time. We say “spend” because time, along with being a human
right, is also a commodity that has value – value that can be given, taken,
shared, wasted, saved, lost, and gained.
We must cherish time. We must appreciate that we have a
right to time. We must reaffirm our commitment to equality of opportunity and
equality of outcome with regard to time; it is a duty of everyone to respect
how each of us can use the time we have.
Just like having a minimum basic income, we need to have a
minimum basic time allotment to spend on ourselves, not working or laboring.
Humans have great intellect. As time passes, we as a species
must use our intellect to evolve how we use our time to achieve a sustainable,
just and peaceful world. We can create a virtuous cycle of ever-expanding human
wisdom and planetary improvement. In addition to promoting time rights and
duties to each other, we must also ensure that we use some of our time to
protect the earth, or our time will be nil. The time is now to recognize that
we must implement a new era of human and earth harmony, together as world
citizens.
Happy New Year! Happy New Now! Happy New World!