Why I Love My Calendar
We need to rein in the chaos of time to save our sanity
There is nothing as optimistic as a calendar — it takes the endlessly unfolding nature of time and gives it structure and circularity, offering us a sense of fresh starts and soft endings. Calendars (and clocks and all devices that mark time) help us manage the very unmanageable notion of time itself. We’d be literally lost without them.
Take 2020 (please). What an awful year this has been, right? Seeing it as “an awful year” holds out the notion that 2020 is a fixed period of time that will come to an end. No one thinks the pandemic or the economy or national divisiveness will disappear, poof!, at midnight on December 31, but still, it feels like… maybe it will be the beginning of a better year. I have never cared much about celebrating New Year’s Day, but this year I can’t wait. I know it’s not rational, but it feels like January 1, 2021 will be a new beginning, a chance to shed the ugly, wrinkled skin of 2020 and be reborn, sleek and silky and full of promise.
Calendars, of course, are an invention. In truth, time is a linear thing, marked only by the recurring seasons and the arc of lifetimes. Otherwise, time is a long march, ever forward. Calendars are comforting; it’s reassuring to feel that time exists in predictable, familiar units rather than in an…
