The traditional New Year’s icon depicts an infant with a sash bearing the new year next to an old bearded man wearing a sash with the old year. “Out with the old, in with the new” is the slogan as the world gets ready to party down. It’s traditional—even as we know in advance that New Year’s Day will bring a hangover, remorse, and an Ash Wednesday point-of-view. That’s also traditional.

 

Those of us in the 70-plus age bracket, once we get past the insult of the old man’s image and the slogan, might say to ourselves, “What? Again? Already?” We just got used to writing 2013 on our checks and now we have to remember again what year it is. The older you are, the faster time moves—everybody knows that, but nobody knows it as well as we do.

 

But we also think about the New Year’s Eve stuff. How many generations ago did we accept the fact that the celebration just wasn’t worth the hangover? And the expense of the party was just too much, coming, as it does, right after Christmas. Perhaps we decided instead to stay up till midnight playing Monopoly while the ball dropped on TV. Then, after the kids were grown and gone, it wasn’t long till we decided not to stay up that late at all.

 

New Year’s Day became another day—except that everything was closed and we had to go to Mass for the Solemnity of Mary. After that, it’s football on TV, and black-eyed peas for dinner (hoppin’ john, hambone, collards and cornbread is the traditional New Year’s dinner where I live). All but the die-hard traditionalists gave up resolutions long ago. After all, Lent is just around the corner—save the sacrifice type of resolution till then.  And we start thinking about taxes….

 

But there is a point at which we let it all go—all of it. Balls dropping on TV, hoppin john, taxes, football. The one thing we keep is the Solemnity of Mary. Why? Because it’s obligatory? Not really. It’s because all the rest is time-bound. It’s temporal. It happens over and over again, and frankly, it gets tiresome. It gets old. Then, we realize that these internal impressions of outward things are actually outward impressions of internal things: We are old, we are tired—not the world. And we are letting go of the world because the world is letting go of us. We worry about becoming burdensome without thinking about what is really becoming burdensome to us. Our kids visit us as a duty now, and we cling to our love for them, and sometimes wonder what we are really clinging to.

 

Secular-minded people have no place to look but backward, so for them old age brings memory. Is that the real reason they seem to “lose” memory? Because they’re actually resisting this backward look? The sentiment of popular culture shows them clinging to memory. Perhaps it’s because, for them, there is nothing beyond time. But for people of faith, it’s different. This is why the only tradition we eventually keep is the Solemnity of Mary. This is why the only thing we finally cling to is our faith. Though we love our lives, and all the people in our lives, we can let it all go. What matters most now is what has always mattered most. And it’s not behind us, but ahead, where it is always a New Year.