happy new year

it's 15 minutes before midnight here on the west coast.  i just watched a couple of videos, one from sydney australia, the other from aukland new zealand.  what a difference.  sydney's famed fireworks new year's celebration was muted with very few people.  aukland's was the opposite.  the streets were thronged with thousands of people.  new zealand has done a better job at managing the pandemic.  here in california we are pretty damn muted in our celebrations.  the virus is off the charts raging.  i don't know what 2021 will bring.  i couldn't have fathomed this time last year that in a couple of months we would be in a full blown pandemic.  how quickly the world changes.  or change, to use an expression, on a dime.  we are not done with our changes.  & i think of how we measure time.  nature doesn't give a shit what we call the year.  we can call it anything we wish.  indeed, in 1999, the famed paleontologist & science educator, stephen jay gould, said that it is humanity that makes the calendar so if we want to call the year 2000 the start of the 21st century, we can.  time is a real, physical thing.  but what we call it is made up by those who do the measuring.  in other words, the names of the years are an extension of time in the way that the exiled russian poet joseph brodsky said that countries are an extension of the space.  whether where brodsky reached for the dictionary the gesture would remain the same.  2020 is gone only to be replaced by 2021.  our problems remain the same no matter what we call the year.  we don't know what is waiting for us in the next 12 months.  we can't know.  & yet, because of my own stubborn optimism, i think that whatever hardships & travails & pleasures & joys await us in this new year, we will face them with our fragile humanity.  for better & for worse.  for i praise, in spite of all evidence, the human being.