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I’m not very fond of celebrating New Year, birthdays, anniversaries, and other cyclical events. I do, but I don’t enjoy these celebrations as much as I should. I admit that it is a kind of failure in my social mechanism, intensified by the terror of routine, the commercialization of the holidays, and my rejection of continuously reminding each other that the wheel of time is inexorable.
Yes, above all, I accept that it is a personal problem. Perhaps my head is too full of repetitions and does not tolerate one more iteration; perhaps I am greedy, and it hurts me to spend money on parties and gifts; or maybe I forget that having a birthday has nothing to do with regretting the time we have left, but with celebrating the time we have already lived. (I remember a friend who, on his 50th birthday, greeted us exclaiming: “I don’t know about you, but I’m here!”).
The thing is that (letting myself get carried away by a dose of misanthropy) I first conceived this text as a reflection against all annual celebrations, understanding that no matter how much we try to renew time, our path always moves us forward. However, as is obvious, when I was about to write about this, nature came upon me and imposed the evidence that repetitions in this life are omnipresent, starting with the most visible: that of day and night.
Some of my readers already know that I like to quote from my talks with Dr. Emilio Rivaud, a distinguished Mexican psychoanalyst, who once told me that the greatest fear human beings experience is that the sun will not rise one day. He has gleaned this fear people have in multiple therapeutic sessions, while I have only glimpsed it in astronomical nightmares where the star king or the moon queen ceases their normal behavior and begins to act strangely, like crashing into Earth or zooming away forever. These are, in fact, some of my most distressing dreams. However, the truth is that despite them, I always awaken to the sun shining without thinking that this means I have overcome the unfathomable terror of an eternal night.
It is clear that, in our lives, cycles matter. Celebrating the New Year has a deep meaning, even if I get tired of repeating rituals that I find insensible (for example, choking on grapes), and even if hugs for my loved ones are no warmer on New Year’s Day than any other day. Undoubtedly, celebrating the New Year and other cycles has significance, and I write this text to prove it.
As a child (suffering the tedium of Sundays), I used to say that the first of January was “the Sunday of Sundays.” Now, from a bird’s eye view, I think that the drunkenness of the last night of the year (for many, obligatory) is a preventive attempt to shovel the metaphysical pain of the next day. The hangover (or whatever we want to call it) helps anesthetize the deep hole of loneliness and absence that remains after the holidays. (“There is no pain more atrocious than being happy,” said a terrible song, and it is obvious that for some, acute pain is present at the end of every celebration and even every human encounter). Indeed, with the famous “rewarming,” where we gather again to eat the leftovers from the previous night, we try to forget the feeling that everything we value in this life is destined to go away, or, as the poet Georges Schehadé said, “There is nothing we love that does not flee like the shadow.”
We may think that the winter cold contributes to this sad feeling. Nevertheless, I am sure that in any season of the year in which the festivities are fixed, the pain is the same: in spring, because of the envy that the flowers arouse in us (“damn spring,” said a brave song on the radio); in summer, because of the intense heat; in autumn… well, come to think of it, autumn is a better time to celebrate, and although autumn parties may not be much fun, the hangover from depression would be less and would undoubtedly serve as a prelude to winter shelter.
Eureka! Maybe that’s exactly what the holidays in December are all about! We can think that in other epochs (perhaps medieval or even pre-industrial times), Christmas and New Year’s yielded to a kind of social hibernation that lasted until March, when the agricultural days began. Both celebrations are the last (and the loudest and happiest) before taking refuge in winter. However, with the birth of our hyper-productive society, harsh reality began to appear in the middle of the cold, and a few days after the festivities, one had to leave home to earn one’s bread by the sweat of the brow.
These are conceptions that I create, believing they can help me vindicate the celebration of the New Year in this essay. However, I think I’m wrong. Moreover, if these are indeed depressing parties, how can we justify them? How will I do this?
Two films I saw recently come to mind. They are old films, and many readers will have seen them by now. One is “Spell of Time,” also known as “Groundhog Day,” with Andie MacDowell and Bill Murray. The other is “Click,” with Adam Sandler. Both are based on brilliant ideas, although in the case of the former, the script and the production are masterful, while in the latter, the workmanship is generally clumsy (which makes it difficult to notice the depth of its theme).
I’ll start with “Spell of Time,” trying not to spoil the plot entirely. The film is about an egocentric man (Phil Connors), who one morning realizes that, by some strange spell, he is reliving the day before. From that moment on, the same thing happens to him every dawn. Stuck in time, he finds himself reliving those unhappy twenty-four hours repeatedly. For what is years for him (we do not know how many, but enough to learn to play the piano excellently), everything around him repeats inexorably without anyone but him noticing.
From the first days, after the initial upheaval, Phil finds in that spell an opportunity to scrutinize the lives of the people around him and abuse them all, except the woman he secretly loves. Those twenty-four hours are not enough for the unbearable fellow to convince her of his love, so it is not long before he plunges into a deep depression, from which he cannot emerge even with the most extreme resources. Finally, when Phil has reached the bottom of the abyss, his egocentrism is shattered, and he begins to turn himself around and open up emotionally to those around him. He begins doing things for them and enters a process of genuine interest in which the school of life turns on some light bulbs in his brain.
“Groundhog Day:”I won’t tell you about it. Watch it. (If you have seen it, watch it again, as we should always do with works of art, especially if they are within our reach.)
How is “Spell of Time” similar to our New Year’s Eve parties, when each solar cycle repeats the well-wishing cards, the fun rituals, and the impossible New Year resolutions? Leaving aside the anguished wonder of Phil’s first dawn (which slightly resembles our mournful sentiment, “What, is it December 31 yet again?”), let us say that for us, too (at least for the egocentrists), each year, time is bewitched, forcing us to return to the previous cycle and relive the illusion that it is enough to deserve something just because we wish for it. Yet, from the first hours that follow, we realize that the existence of others will not favor our plans; the turns of time do not cease to restore the hope that this year will favor them! We will be so strong that others will stop hindering us.
I say it jokingly, but the truth is, woe to those who succeed! For those of us who are allowed to fail again and again, life confronts us with the same frustrating experience, giving us the opportunity to change, get out of the cycle, and abandon our repeated fantasies of self-sufficiency. According to the wise masters of the so-called school of life, when this happens, most of us believe that change will be achieved by humiliating the ego and striving to eliminate it. However, this martyrdom is only a detour, in some cases inevitable. Philosophies such as the “Spell of Time“ or the Chinese oracle I Ching tell us that this repeated return fulfills its mission when we stop contemplating our ego and (without the need to defeat it) let it be and turn to look elsewhere, towards others, making the vicious cycle become a virtuous spiral.
Reprimand the ego or overcome it. The other film I want to talk about, “Click,” shows us a man who, thanks to a magical remote control that allows him to fast forward through the annoying parts of his life (among other things), finds himself able to skip all the interruptions to his ego and leave it intact. With that magic, Michael (the character’s name) evades redundant marital quarrels, boring encounters, useless parties, and annoying illnesses that hinder his purposes of success and promotion. He is a true entrepreneur for those willing to eliminate all obstacles to their advancement. His remote control does not permit any challenge where he has to stop to change or learn something. He can skip anything that sounds like a “school of life,” but in doing so, he skips his own existence. Life becomes reduced to a few days, at the end of which, with a vulnerable ego like Phil’s, he learns the fundamental lesson: that even with all the annoying repetitions, the present moment is the only thing we have and, consequently, the people we love, who are in it.
The above adds to our theme: The end-of-year celebrations are not simple social procedures in the middle of our productivity race, where we are eager to skip all routines, always pressing forward in a linear pursuit of objectives. The best New Year’s resolutions are the ones that bring us back to this time when others are by our side. Marcel Proust (with his famous In Search of Lost Time) has already shown that the purpose of time is to recover ourselves. A life of persecution is only valuable if it fails and if it gives us the opportunity, like Michael, to reach the present moment. In the meantime, we must immerse ourselves in the cycles of time and rise from the ashes repeatedly, like a phoenix at first half-lame and grounded but always hopeful of being born fully.*
I do not want to end this text with even more triumphalist phrases than I have already hinted. I risk sounding like those greeting cards in which we all wish each other nice things (harmony, prosperity, health), but almost no one hears with the heart. The truth is that people like me are missing many laps. We must learn many life lessons before we take a step towards that place and time where we already are, that here and now that teachers talk about, and that we, first-year students, mention as if we understand.
For the time being, we only have “real” (what is said to be “real”) in the school of life, which, in addition to its daily lessons, every year offers us its Winter Intensive Courses, which presents us the opportunity to pass old subjects. Forgive me if I repeat here three of the hundreds, thousands, millions of pearls of wisdom that I lack: “Listening to others is the best way to feel encouragement,” “Sharing is the only way for everything to move forward,” and “To celebrate is to glimpse what we are missing every day.”
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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