Traditionally we say “New Year, New Life,” and this phrase encapsulates both passage and renewal, two fundamental elements that mark the passage of time not only on the physical plane but also on the psychic one.
Nature has a cyclical pattern that repeats itself continuously even though it is incessantly metamorphosing and evolving; psychic nature, on the other hand, needs defined and symbolically represented times of passage such as the New Year, a time of the End and Beginning of a New Year.
After all, it is a very ancient holiday period that is lost in the mists of time. It certainly has to do with archaic cults related to agriculture. In ancient Rome they celebrated in the period leading up to the winter solstice the
Saturnalia
in honor of the god Saturn precisely who presided over the transition between the dying sun and the new one that is to be reborn. Saturn is also the god who symbolically withdraws the dice and throws them back, searching for new combinations. A curiosity: it is believed that the game of Tombola, which is a classic Christmas game, derives with all subsequent modifications and assimilations, from the Great God Game. It is no coincidence that Christian tradition placed the birth of Christ at this time of year. Saturnalia also coincided with celebrations for the god Janus, the two-faced god to whom the first month of the year, January, is dedicated. Janus, who was not a Greek but an Italic deity, traditionally ruled all beginnings and passages, such as house thresholds, doors and had received from Saturn the gift of knowing the past and the future.
All this cultural-historical excursus to emphasize how the end-of-year days with the frenzy, restlessness, melancholy, apprehension, etc. that accompany them are not only the result of our consumerist society but refer to much more ancient and universal motions of the human soul.
It is a time of budgets, of resolutions. But resolutions and budgets are often loaded with judgments and comparisons. One dwells on what went wrong or was missed. We hardly question the more or less idealized goal we had set for ourselves, not so much in reference to its achievement, but to the deeper meaning it had for us and our lives.
We tend to focus on what went “wrong,” lapping our brains to operate a “straightening out.” What if instead that “crooked” element represented the possibility of looking from a different angle?
We tend to repeat the same patterns (of interpreting reality, of behavior, of reaction) over and over again. True renewal comes through change….
Yes, change is the magic word.
Change means going through a process, a transition from one inner state to another; it means losing parts of ourselves, welcoming the different, remaining in uncertainty, because it is a process that can take a long time.
Without fear of emptiness, because space is needed for the new.
