Round and Round

Having learned a few things about our personal preferences over the years, we finally just stayed home on New Years.  No parties, no gatherings, nothing.  We watched the thousands of people gathered in Times Square from the safety of our television and not once did I regret not "being there."
To tell you the truth, it's sort of heartening to see a totally secular holiday become as contrived and overwrought as the religious ones.  Thankfully, we're still reeling from the conspicuous consumption of Christmas that we haven't yet started any obligatory New Years gift giving.
All is quiet on New Years day.
While it is entirely a mental attitude, it does rather feel like a clean slate, a fresh calendar, a new cycle of stuff happening.  What's the first brush stroke on the canvas, the first mark on the clean sheet of paper?  Is the beginning really more significant than any other day of the year?
Probably not.
But this is all part of our human existence in linear time, we mark passings and we celebrate these annual cycles.  I don't know exactly why, but I do know it has been going on for a very long time, and has attestation across cultural and geographical boundaries.  Since we first started observing the sun, even when we thought it was a big chariot ridden across the sky by a god, we have noticed that its behavior was rather predictable and we ascribed some sort of meaning to its cycle.
Bam, you have a culturally significant event, which people can share and celebrate should they so choose.  And you also have a rather widespread feeling of starting over again.
Michele and I watched Silver Linings Playbook last night while we were waiting for midnight to strike.  It was one of those movies which might loosely be called a comedy/drama or maybe even a romantic movie, but there was something weird about it; it made me kind of tense for a good part of the movie.
The main character, played by Bradley Cooper, was a man fresh out of an institution after suffering a violent breakdown precipitated by discovering his wife's infidelity, and nearly beating the man to death.  As it turns out he has been bipolar for most of his life and is now forced by law to deal with that reality.  I have to give Cooper some serious credit for his job in playing this character, he manages to capture the seriousness of the problem, and the really problematic behaviors associated with it, without destroying the empathy you have for the character.  You want to smack him sometimes, but it's out of a desire to help him see the obvious truth.
It ended up being a good movie to watch on New Year's Eve because it is essentially about a couple of very broken people finally getting a clean slate.  You can't help but be happy for them.  There are no guarantees that everything is going to be fine in the future but you are left hopeful, that maybe this year will be better than the last.
Isn't that why we have probably celebrated cycles and new beginnings for so very long?