Here we are, another year. What can be said about the ‘new year’ that has not already been said, many times over? Well, perhaps that is the point. It is a ‘new year’, and with it, new opportunities. For millennia, people around the world have looked to the passage of time - and in particular, the transition from one year to the next - as an opportunity for renewal. Joseph Campbell, the leading scholar of the 20th century on all things mythological, referred to it as the the ‘eternal return’, the cycle of birth, death and rebirth that cultures have honored in one way or another for thousands of years.

In keeping with my last blog entry, what can this mean in our post-postmodern age? Conceivably many different things, and yet, perhaps there is a shared or collective meaning that is not altogether postmodern, possibly quite pre-modern. Perhaps it is simply that opportunities await, like the potential energy stored in a ball sitting on a shelf, waiting to drop, or a match, ready to light. Perhaps it is the opportunity to embrace the fact of change. Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher, captured the nature of reality with his observation that you cannot step into the same river twice, because the river is constantly changing, just as time always passing. The fact that the date changes from 2015 to 2016 merely reminds us of this a little more poignantly than, say, the change from yesterday to today. So, whether we are looking at the daily, the weekly, the monthly or the yearly calendar, each day- indeed each moment - affords new possibilities, new opportunities. What we choose to do, or say, or notice is up to us. But the newness of each moment, or day, or year is there, if we are prepared to take notice.

So, perhaps the meaning of the new year is really the meaning of each day, or each moment (provided we slow down to notice), which is that if we pay attention, and think about what lies before us, we can approach each day with greater wisdom than the one before, a wisdom that is based on recognizing the potentiality of what can be, provided we ourselves are open, rather than closed or asleep to it.