Happy New Year!? Happy almost new year? Or, happy already new year?
Where I live, there are all kinds of “new years”: In about five weeks, Chinese New Year will burst out over several days. Two months after that, it will be Tamil New Year. Islamic New Year will arrive in October. And of course the new year of the Christian liturgical calendar has already been with us for several weeks.
So yes, happy Gregorian New Year to some of you!
And the moral of the story is… Well, I actually don’t know whether blog posts are supposed to have “a moral of the story.” Nonetheless, I like to think about at least two points.
First, I consider myself hugely privileged for being able to belong to a place where so many diverse traditions live together. All these times of “New Year” and their diverse celebrations – what fun to be part of that!
Second, not everybody has the opportunity to live in such a multicultural environment, but many could stretch themselves just a little bit and get a taste of what an amazing world we live in. Poverty is sometimes a matter of the mind. We can choose to enrich ourselves or to impoverish ourselves by what we seek to put into our mind. This year, choose to be rich!
(Read up on your Chinese neighbors’ New Year’s celebrations? Have a chat with the imam at the nearest mosque about their calendar? Ask someone from a distant corner of the world when their traditional year starts?)
And to all, Happy New Years for this year!