Next Year Will Be Different

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 549, 30 December 1949, Page 4

Next Year Will Be Different

E have come now to the season of hopefulness, the time when we look back at the year from which we are escaping, and forwards into the year which presently will enclose us. It is, perhaps, an illusion to suppose that the flow of time can be divided neatly into segments. There is only the pulse of living: the systole and diastole of the heart, and the larger dilation in nature, where day and night, summer and winter, recur in the cosmic rhythm. We all know that time moves on without jnterruption and that its divisiominto years is a device in measurement which the human race finds convenient. Yet we know also that it is a device sanctioned by the movement of the earth around the sun. Every time the planet completes a revolution in the orbit fixed by the pull of the star which gives us life we pass through changes of many kinds--changes in the body, in personal and social circumstance, and in the corporate affairs which are materials of history. A year is important to us individually because it makes us older. The importance varies in accordance with our age and condition. Children are not disturbed if summer is over, because they expect to live indefinitely; but their elders may be thoughtful when the leaves are blown away on the wind. The thought of time is coloured by per- | sonal experience. One man looks back upon 1949 with satisfaction, because while he was passing through it he achieved something notable, or fell in love (with happy results), or went abroad into the world outside. For him, therefore, the year will have warmth in his memory. Another will see it in greyness if he has been ill or unhappy, or frustrated in his work; ‘|and he will turn from it thankfully. Sometimes, too, the people have passed together through

some crisis, so that we speak later of the "war years" or the "years of depression," and there can be few who would want to live them again. Indeed, most of us come to realise that it would be better not to return, if that were possible, to any parts of our lives; for the good times have to be taken from the bad, and even in the best of years there is much that is painful to remember. Nevertheless, at year’s end the stubborn hopefulness reasserts itself. Before us once again are the unspoiled seasons. This time, perhaps, they will bring us something of great value: we shall be fortunate or successful; or we shall move from sickness into health. We tend to look ahead as if all our delights and troubles were travelling towards us from an open future, whereas in sober fact they are already formed for us by interlocking thoughts and actions and events which are in the past. Even then, however, there is justification for hope. It may be now that we shall be rewarded in a splendid way for efforts that seem to have been unnoticed or unfruitful. Therefore we look expectantly at 1950, a year with figures so rounded and decisive — cutting across a century — that it must surely be portentous. Changes are interesting and surprising when they are brought together in retrospect, as Alan Mulgan has assembled them in his review of the past 50 years in New Zealand; but in our lives we feel most of them gradually: they creep upon us, and even when we have planned them they are never quite what we expected them to be. On Saturday next, when we take part in midnight celebrations, or hear them broadcast from the cities, we shall be hoping for various reasons that 1950 will be "better" than 1949, If we are learning from experience, however, we shall be sure of only one thing: that it will be different,