Time, if you have time enough to contemplate on it, I am sure, will be a fixation that would be more baffling than the basic hub of all the existential philosophies across cultures and civilizations—the primordial who-am-I stuff that kick-started all these ruminations about the metaphysics among the early homo-sapiens who were sentimentally smart.
In other words, at least a few among the cave dwellers and the hunter-gatherers must have a time fixation to ruminate on businesses other than their immediate life-worries, such as physical safety and food.
Thank God, if back then, in pre-historical times, calendar as a concept did not exist. Time must not have mattered beyond sun rise and sun set, dawn and dusk, and day and night. Nevertheless, I am sure that the notion of time as a philosophical concept must have originated even before man’s conscious attempt to bring in an organised avatar of the time in shape of calendars and almanacs such as the Mayan, Aztecan, Mesopotamian, Iranian, Hindu, Buddhist, Hellenic, Julian, the Egyptian one of the Bronze Age and many others.
Calendars make an attempt to bind time with a beginning and an end. While even the earliest Egyptian calendar of the Bronze Age had a fixed 365 days’ tenure for a year, time, which is one entity for all has seen very many calendars for itself among succeeding generations across civilisations. There are lunar calendars, solar calendars and the lunisolar calendars that use different counts of time for a year.
The point is, with the advent of the time in a framework for convenience’s sake, for whatever reasons and purposes, in them man found something to celebrate that was devoted to the very time itself — a Happy New Year.
It must not have remained the way we take the advent of a new year; with fake revels and ostentatious optimism; without any serious basis and convictions. Whatever, the concept of a new year and that of being courteous to what is considered as a new beginning, a perpetual game by the transient beings, all to celebrate another game called life that is ironically fragile in direct contrast to what is the most robust. The never-ending, the ever-renewing version of the time — the present or the now. Incidentally and ironically, there is no calendar yet to measure this now and tap it for our convenience. It will still be there when it is not there anymore by the measure of your calendar, which won’t help unless you have a time concept that is fleeting every second.
The revellers prepare to greet the New Year. The celebrities throw parties. There are entertainment shows on television. The last minute anxiety is there to see even in the face of the hired artists on television who do the show days before the New Year for a telecast on the new year’s eve. Their bated breath, their last ten seconds reverse counting to the zero hour, the bursting of balloons, the hugs, the moments of much awaited truth for the smooching opportunists, the cake, the drink, the crackers, all speak loudly for the time even though the majority do not mean it that way. But then, we all do it.
Coming to the bating breaths anxiously journeying to the zero hour with the reverse count of the last ten seconds, the news that the new year is going to come one second late this time, mind you if you have to count this New Year’s eve from number eleven backwards to be precisely accurate with the “atomic” time scale. An extra second called the “leap second” will be added to the world’s clocks on the New Year eve. Wonder what way it would matter to the time if you do not add that one precise-second to the world clock, which the atomic timekeepers claim is independent of the earth’s rotation of the sun.
It would still be the very timelessness, the ever present second that is independent of all material calculations by the mindful revellers.
