New Year's encourages reflection. During my usual reflections I focus on the feelings I had or the feelings I have postmortem. So at New Year's I can pretend a more objective view, group past events and relationships into good and not-so-good. This accounting creates a distance--a distance reinforced by the idea that I am ending one time and starting another with the changing of the calendar.
My calendar and my accounting are both rhetorical acts. The calendar helps gather and organize my perceptions of experience. I demarcate periods in which I have, for example, grown so much in this way, or lapsed in my efforts towards this or that. The calendar is a tool in my self-accounting and self-creation, and I can use it when I point to this or that period and argue that my behavior then was affected by some other concern, or by carryover from events in previous days.
If I could see time otherwise.
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