On Calendars (and the moon)
I’ve been thinking about the moon a lot more than usual, lately. For anyone familiar with the moon-centric period of my twitter era, “a lot more than usual” might sound like an impossible overstatement, but I assure any of you reading this that this is a new and more serious interest than before seen.
I started thinking about the moon because of an exercise that was posed regarding attention and how we manage our attention, which is deeply related to the reasons I started this site in the first place. The exercise was simply a question, and then a reflection; first, the question: in what phase is the moon currently? The reflection then was upon whether or not we could answer that with surety, and how that reflected against historical context. For thousands of years (c. 8000 BCE) our understanding of time was directly correlated to lunation as a way to measure a span of time, and it wasn’t until much more recently (c. 45 BCE) that we more or less “officially” divorced these concepts for a growing portion of the world’s population with the reform of the Julian calendar. Calendars in other cultures still reference, reflect, or regard lunation as a more integral part of the timekeeping process and seasonal/annual progression, but with the ubiquitous use of the Gregorian calendar and its use of leap years (and seconds) in an effort to align us with the Earth’s orbit of the sun (an admittedly difficult process to observe directly from here on Earth, in my opinion… arguably seasons can reflect this, but alas) it’s easy to lose track of natural timekeeping methods that are simply observable in the world around us. For another example, plant cycles such as flowers blooming, fruits ripening, trees changing, and the falling of leaves can all introduce observable, interactive seasonality into our lives. Reflecting on how I feel different between the first ripening scents of summer to now, as the unpicked blackberries start to wilt and fall in the late summer sun, is a much more personal and directly identifiable feeling than asking me “What did you feel like on June 3rd in contrast to how you felt yesterday?”
I know that it might sound less than useful to hear a modern lunatic decrying the development of calendars, seeking a glorious return to simply counting lunations or portions of, and I know there could be valid arguments against it based on the reasons I’ve been giving. Sure, the Julian and Gregorian were based on physical, observable processes as well; in relation to the other bodies in the Solar system we can track our own traversal around the sun and realize its about 365.25 days, leading to the Julian. Give it 1500 years, and we’ll realize (based on the moon!) that Easter is wrong and adjust accordingly. Without these observable processes, we could not make these developments, but as we did these, we also saw the standardization of the calendar across nations, the standardization of the start for the new year, and other more arbitrary adjustments. These can make things easier, of course: legal matters, historical tracking, and whatnot, but I think that the origin for my dissent is something simpler.
When I think of calendars and clocks, I feel beholden to something that I don’t necessarily feel is helping me directly. When I think of measuring time through the sun, the moon, and the seasons as they are directly observable to simple little me, I feel that I’m a part of something from which I am inseparable. In my mind, this is a valuable feeling. Disconnection from the things in which we’re engaged is something I think plagues us; at least, I’ve felt this affliction, and those closest to me have felt this as well. Finding ways to feel wholly integrated, whether that makes us feel pleasantly irresponsible or all-powerful based on our perspective, seems worth pursuing, and I think we can get closer to that through simple things like reflecting upon the passage of time in more meaningful ways.