New Year

New years are so arbitrary. It's fun marking time like this but really, it's just another day. We make it mean so much, which is great. It's a great opportunity to reflect and consider and regroup, but it's just something we've created to help us mark time.

I've been thinking a lot about time lately and noticing how really a second is a heartbeat. It's the time between beats of your own heart. So it's not so much that humans have created time, but we ARE time. We are actual clocks walking around. And women, for sure, we're monthly calendars as well as regular time pieces.

So if we are time, that changes the whole problem of "I don't have enough time." It would change to "I'm time for this (or that)," or not. Where are you going to be with your time? How will you be? Just questions...

We label things that are important to us. We give names to relationships and have loads of distinctions for things. I was thinking about that as I was eating snow last night on Major's Hill Park watching the fireworks on New Years Eve with my ex-husband and our daughter and her friend and her friend's dad, who's also my ex's friend. And I was thinking about how I've heard that northern communities have more words for snow than we have, and I figure that's because snow has a big impact on them and so how they describe it will be more important to them. My relationships are important and that's why I've got former husbands and ex-boyfriends and current friends and people that have crossed over in both directions.

So there I was eating snow and I wound up with that taste in my mouth that only seems to come from having eaten snow, and I'm looking at the fireworks and also noticing the reflection the fireworks were making in the windows of the National Gallery and the Chateau Laurier, and I'm just loving my life. Loving how it's turned out, loving who's been in it with me, who's in it now, and what's happening. And even though people stress me out and bother me in general, I'm also really grateful and impressed with who people are, with what they go through and live with and how really amazing people are. And I notice the names I've given to different relationships because they're important to me, mother, daughter, partner, and different names, because I say so. And we say so, because it's important to us. Our society is concerned with relationships and so we have lots of ways to describe them.

And time is important to us, so we mark it in different ways and celebrate at different times even if we don't feel like it. As humans passing through this plane/sphere/whatever it is, we like to label the things that are important and so even though the New Year may be actually pretty arbitrary, especially to birds and cats and rocks and planets, it's important to us. And so we mark it. Happy New Year!