We celebrated the passing of another year on the Gregorian calendar last week, which has been the standard measure for recording the passage of time since 1582. The Gregorian calendar was an improvement over the Julian calendar which went into effect in the Roman Empire on January 1, 45 BCE.
If the goal of a calendar is to keep the solstice and equinox dates the same, so that a year is equivalent to a single rotation of the earth around the sun, the Julian calendar was flawed with a drift of roughly three days per 400 years. By the time of Pope Gregory, the vernal equinox was falling on March 10 instead of March 21, and this messed up the calculation of the date of Easter, which was set at the Council of Nicaea and bound to the vernal equinox. So, one can accurately say that the new Gregorian calendar of 1582 was inspired by the Council of Nicaea in 325!
While the Gregorian calendar is widely used around the world for the sake of political uniformity, there are many countries and cultures that use lunar or lunisolar calendars to observe their unique cultures and religious observances. There are 12 cultures around the world still using lunisolar calendars, including those for Chinese, Hebrew, and Islamic peoples. Personally, I like to count time by the church liturgical year. Today is the third day after Epiphany.
While calendars are important for reporting history and scheduling farming practices, the unit of time that most affects individuals is the day. Every day people wake from sleep and start afresh. In those key moments after waking, people make decisions about their planned daily activities. Those decisions shape their mood, their interaction with others, and their religious practices.
Dating back to the Babylonians some 4,000 years ago, people made New Year’s Resolutions to improve their lives for the coming year.
I think considering life changes only once a year is too infrequent. People need to be empowered to change their lives at any point they become unhappy with their life paths, not just annually with the New Year.
A healthier period of time to consider change is daily when people wake from sleep. People would be healthier if they would get in the habit of taking a moment at the beginning of their day to center themselves, and make decisions about how they want to live THAT day.
Too often people live by the crises of the day instead of living by their values. A person who values family must prioritize spending time with family, and that might mean making changes to their work schedule to be more efficient, delegating duties to others, or postponing work tasks to accommodate those family values. If that decision isn’t made at the beginning of the day, it’s too easy to prioritize the urgent over one’s values and family time usually loses.
New Year’s Resolutions are good and all, but daily resolutions are much more effective. Tape a reminder to your bathroom mirror. Prioritize your values for the day, not the year.
