Curious to receive this, today, just after waking and in my 'incoming mailbox.' I arose in the Geekdom of my own hypnopompic thoughts (those hallucinatory images and words that visit us as we move out of sleep states) wondering about New Years ... Chinese New Years (the Spring Festival), Muslim New Years (Hijri) and Julian Calendar New Years ... accompanied by foods, sparks of fireworks and champagnes. Tonight begins the Lunar New Year of the Jewish Calendar. It is called Rosh ha'Shannah. 1 out of 500 people (World Jewish fraction of population) may have some connection with this calendar, those who stay close to their people's holidays and rituals.
I've mentioned, before, my compulsive interest in words whose meanings fly just beneath our radar.
PaperMate Pens .... and .... EverSharp Pens ....
FrigidAires ... KleenEx ... Kitchen Aids
and many more words and brand names that we use and whose obvious meanings don't quite make it to our awareness.
And so I was puzzling ... the Biblical word Shannah or year arises from the same root-word as l'Shannos ... to change. And while I don't suspect folk 2000 years or more ago had calendars, there must've been an awareness of renewal in the ongoing change process that signifies the real and the living. I once had a public argument at a conference with a man who thought to explain 3 dimensionality from a growth out of lower dimensions by some kind of quantum magic; this was between us a truly Nerdish argument (rah-rah football types, Sorrority and Fraternity Siblings ... you can sign out, now ... it would be better for us both).
My position was different. For me, lower dimensions don't EXIST, any more than do higher ones, at least they will never be in our ken. To exist? to be Real? is to occupy 3-dimensions along an always moving dimension of change which we most typically call "time." The Real is what we encounter in Space-Time, in our 4-dimensional playground. Nothing else counts. Nothing else exists.
We continue changing in every moment, even if that process is punctuated by certain instances when we celebrate that change... Rosh ha'Shannah ... 'the head or new-beginning of Change.'
Maybe that's what's so difficult? Celebrating the change. In my office, I've watched many people try to stop the clock ... try to introduce fixed ways of dealing with the "Everchanging." When the God of Moses speaks to him from the Bush that Would Not Stop Burning, responding to Moses' request that God be named ... his God responds "I shall be as I shall be" ... "Look, Moe ... Sonny and Cher said it best: "And the beat goes on."
Yeah, yeah ... some changes are too quick. Cancer cells clone themselves too quickly for other cells to keep up. Our children and grandchildren go from getting their first tooth and taking their first step to making love with someone from another Space-Time locality and decide to emigrate and choose their own ways and to spawn on their own.
Slow down, Kid
Squawking: "Hey, guys, I'm not ready" ... doesn't do any good.
New Years, perhaps, are moments when we grasp the never-ending and always-changing character of the Real ... of Us ... of our Lives.
What is, my Dear Horatio, is only that which changes.
What stays the same has already died.
What is the Last Quarter? Well, truthfully, there is no last quarter ... the Bush keeps Burning, the Generations unfold, the Wars keep waging, and most of the time I feel blessed that when I reach across the bed in the middle of the night, the space-time traveller with whom I've shared those unfoldings, with whom I've experienced the Real in all its Gore and Glory, ... is still there rocketing in her stillness through Time-Space.
Hey, people who share beds:
The snores of that person next to you are the signals
that the rocket's afterburners are still hot!
I think my favorite book is the 2800 year old pamphlet ... Ecclesiastes ... Kohelles ... The Congregant ... the guy who tries to find meaning in his meanderings but only finds the companionship and love that allows us to travel through these changes unalone.
As Porky Pig says:
That's It (that's all there is), Folks!
(That's all she wrote!)
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