Well, it wasn’t until a few days ago that I realized a decade is coming to an end, and a new decade is beginning. A friend joked with me about “decades.” I hadn’t been thinking of it that way. I’d been in the new “year” wondering.
There’s some added relevance in that ten year perspective, isn’t there. There’s some added weight and significance too. There’s some “bigger bucket” to explore.
Of course it is arbitrary. The Gregorian Calendar, one system of time, widely adopted, tells us we are shifting a ten year marker. This Gregorian version came in the late 1500s, named after a Catholic Pope, and eventually adopted as “common era.”
Never mind the calendar proper (Gregorian style), the arbitrariness is also in what we choose to mark as beginning and ending — we humans have cognitive capacity to do such things, to reclaim the subjective that is as true as any objective. We are, after all, now approaching half way through the decade that began 2015.
I don’t need to get too nutty about this. It’s fun to celebrate after all. It’s fun to invoke a bunch of metaphoric references to 2020 and having clear vision. It’s fun to note that a lot of us who do community visioning work will start invoking more commonly a 2030 reference.
This morning in my private journal, I began to list a few significant events that have occurred over the last ten years. Yup, some fantastic joys. Yup, some pretty fantastic sorrows too. Some, “oh yah, that”s that made me smile and feel a bit of awe, even for the general view of what has occurred over the last 3,650 days and nights. It’s good to feel the constant, isn’t it — the sun does tend to come up, and set, in what we humans mark as “days,” and in a general enough way, in what corn and other botany forms mark as “time to grow” or “time to rest.”
I love coming in to relationship with others where we expose more of the arbitrary that has been culturally adopted as concrete. I love claiming the freedom that is under that, that is about growing consciousness, and I would suggest kindness, and I would suggest the kairos (not chronos) versions of time that are more characterized by flow.
I also love welcoming the celebration. Here we go 2020, arbitrary as you may be. Here’s to these ten years that have gone by. Here’s to this little moment now. Here’s to ten years that will pass and that yield a 2030. Here’s to the certainties. Here’s to the mysteries. And here’s to the company that we keep to mark moments, and to help claim for any of us, just a bit more of what we feel, matters.
