Happy New Year! Really?

It is just so fascinating to think of how one decision made by a Catholic Pope in the year 1582 changed the course of time itself. Now we combine the supposed year that Jesus the Christian Lord with astronomical phenomena, namely how many times this rock we live on revolves around its sun, to determine all sorts of thing. Based on the decision made by Pope Gregory the 13th, it is now decreed that a person isn't old enough to drink alcohol until the Earth flew around the sun 21 times. Perhaps such a logic would sound really ridiculous to a space alien who would come here to study life on this planet? But what is time, anyway? It is a measure by which events are sequenced. That's really about all it is. And the measure is based on what people over the ages felt what scientific occurrences it should be based on.

Now what if we measured time based on how many times the moon revolves around the Earth? That's how the Roman calendar worked, which was used about 2,762 years ago. (Is that 2,762 Gregorian calendar years?) What then? Well, now we reach the age of 21 years five whole Gregorian years earlier. So, in a sense, a person would then be old enough to start drinking alcohol at the age of 16, which was actually 21 then. But as time went on over the centuries, it was somehow determined that other universal movements should determine how mature a person is. This seems to be the most logical reason why we feel a seven year old child is being, well, childish when he or she may have a brilliant idea, while a forty year old with a PhD would be taken quite a bit more seriously, even if his idea isn't quite so plausible.

This is why I measure a person's value not by the Earth's movement but by the fact that they are a PERSON. What novel concept. Children can offer amazing, and sometimes downright extraordinarily creative, insights into how the world can be a better place. It is written in the Christian gospels that Jesus once said, "Unless we become like children, we cannot enter the Kingdom Of Heaven." My interpretation of this is thus: unless we rid ourselves of our false notions, our blindness, our ego, our "adult" logic, and become simplistic, we will never experience true joy and our connectivity to The Divine.

Now it's almost 4 in the morning and I'm tired of thinking. It's time for me to go to bed. After all, I have to rest up in order to enjoy the first day of the next trip around the sun.