Vow to resolve this spring

You Gregorian timekeepers with your booze and your fireworks and your New Year’s resolutions.

Here’s a new year’s resolution: I resolve to make no new year’s resolutions.

It’s like the song “Free Will” by Rush: “You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

If you resolve not to resolve, you still have made a resolution.

Our calendar’s celestial guide is the Earth’s revolution around the sun, but it was not always, as some of us needed many solar years to figure out a star doesn’t circle a planet and we aren’t the center of the universe.

Some still haven’t caught on.

Before Jesus numbered our years and a heliocentric cycle marked their passage, humans measured their lives by phases of the moon. The Babylonian calendar was divided into 12 moon cycles, starting each new year near the spring equinox.

That’s the way to go, if you ask me: The heck with starting a year right after the winter solstice. If you want a fresh start, wait ‘til the weather warms, flowers bloom and Daylight Saving Time returns.

When is that, anyway? Let me check again….

Daylight Saving Time will return at 2 a.m. Sunday, March 12, and the sun will cross the equator again at 6:29 a.m. EDT Monday, March 20, for the vernal equinox.

Should I resolve to make any resolutions, I’ll wait ‘til then, like the Babylonians. Those guys knew how to start a year.

But they did not so well know how to measure one, because moon cycles fell about 10 days short.

Like the Babylonians, the Greeks didn’t start years in winter. The Athenians kicked it off on the first new moon after the summer solstice.

That would be OK with me, too. I could resolve to wear more sunscreen and take more trips to the beach.

We got our months from moon cycles, but the Romans gave us the names, from their gods and emperors and Latin numbers.

The early Roman calendar also was shy of a solar year, so Julius Caesar tried to fix it with a realignment called the Julian calendar, adopted in 46 A.D. It wasn’t off by 10 days, like a moon-cycle calendar.

It was about 10 minutes too long – which accumulated until it was off by 10 days.

So in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued an order to correct the error.

That’s what we have today, the Gregorian calendar, marking each trip around the sun with moon-cycle months bearing Roman names, and years counted before or after Jesus.

That’s how this got to be Jan. 2, 2017, anyway, if we don’t get into Arabic numerals. And we won’t, because some people think that if we talk about Arabic numerals, the terrorists win.

So thanks to Pope Gregory XIII, we by year are dating our paperwork differently than we were Saturday.

And thanks to some custom called New Year’s resolutions, we’re supposed to change our lives, and vow to be better than we were last week, to exert more self-discipline, and work harder toward our goals.

Why? Because it’s January.

I don’t think so. Given the free will to choose when to change my life, I don’t jump at the first weeks of winter. Why should I so emphasize the dictates of Pope Gregory XIII, anyway? He praised the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Protestants, you know.

Groundhog Day, when winter’s half-over, is just a month away, and spring is only six weeks beyond that, whether the groundhog sees its shadow or not.

I’ll wait to resolve my issues.

Maybe I’ll vow not to procrastinate.

This story was originally published January 1, 2017 at 1:32 PM with the headline "Vow to resolve this spring."