What if time had no years?

‘It is December.The conclusion to a long year, a year in which the events that occurred would have made people laugh at the mention of, a few years back. While a lot is about the world around you – people making lists of the biggest things that happened, videos dedicated to the biggest trends on the internet, it is also a good time to maybe, retrospect. About yourself, that is. Did you do anything memorable? Did you stick to any resolutions this time (highly improbable)? Did you grow as a human being?

Ah, the deeper questions of life that hammer your head once every few sleepless nights. But the end of the year is for some, a terrifying time; the semesters seem to fly away and it is terrifying to think change, really is inevitable.

Let’s however throw away the gloomy future and immerse ourselves in an alternate timeline (damn you Flash), where time is measured differently. Earth, where astronomers couldn’t agree on a uniform system. Earth, where our lives were just in days, day after day – no months. Or even better, where we all decided to stick to our own different calendars, not the modern universally used Gregorian calendar. It is kind of crazy to think about because if you don’t know Hindus have three separate calendars, and these vary within each state – complete chaos would ensue. Being a secular country, India might have quite a number of issues normalizing the calendars. I can almost see the headlines – “Angry calendar activists take to the streets”.

In plain words, it would be a world where there would be no well defined annual cycles. No countdowns to a new year, no resolutions being forced upon oneself, no year in review and what not. The pressures of analyzing your existence year after year won’t exist. Maybe instead of procrastinating yearly work to later months, we might do things quicker. Industries would evaluate their minions – day wise, schools would instruct on an hourly basis. Our parents would have a great time interrogating us on our prospective future more frequently. A kind of messed up system but nevertheless it might actually be more futile when it comes to time management. Employees can’t hide for a couple of months and work the rest. There would be anxious nights giving us more wake up calls than we would’ve ever had in the other world.

You wouldn’t be able to think of yearly progresses, your every day would be your only goal. Perhaps you would not take your days as lightly as we all did now. You would wake up, plan a day around with nothing annually to look forward to. News broadcasts might not be rehashing things that happened a year back. No more standardized birthdays, just ‘hey I am a 10000 days old now’. And when would a movie release? The crew would have to spend days figuring out the day on all our calendars to release in various countries. Our phones would have world clocks as well as world dates, and a net number of days in history. The forgetful people whose anniversaries were never a good day, might get away with it here. And the Google doodle might be twin leaves to pay respect to the now, instead of past demises.

Ignoring other trivial matters, you could maybe appreciate the universe better. Although the past year might have had a lot of disappointments, this one year makes up 5% of our tiny little lives for the most of us. Would you talk about the elections or Brangelina in the future? A suggestion would be to look at that purple shaded 2000 note – give it a nice glare and rant away. On a bittersweet note, also remember the shenanigans you were up to this year and also hopefully one or two proud memories too.

-Harshini Ramanujam