Welcoming 2021 [and Everything That Comes with It]

Happy New Year!

I’m not sorry to see 2020 go — you? On the other hand, I’m not expecting to dance in the streets welcoming 2021 (that would be exhausting), because all we’re talking about is a tiny mark on a bone.

The bone, found in Ishango in Central Africa (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) was an early version of our calendar. It dates to about 9000 BCE and was marked with scratches to show lunar phases* and track the passage of “time” (really just the behavior of a mottled silver disk in the sky). This is not a calendar you’ll receive from the World Wildlife Fund — they’ve converted to paper (although an animal bone would seem appropriate for the WWF).

My point is that moving from one mark on a bone to the next doesn’t change the spread of disease, the distribution of vaccine, the exploding U.S. national debt, or the play of the Jacksonville Jaguars. So, we’ll still be wringing our hands (and hopefully washing them frequently) over all the worrisome things happening in our world.
I hope you have a plan for how to survive 2021. I’m working on mine, and hope to have it finished before Mitch McConnell is revealed as an alien “Lizard Man,” because although a lot of Americans might be pleased to say, “I told you so!” I’d be scared out of my Gourd.

Please be safe, be well, and try to bring some happiness into your lives and that of others as you move through the New Year towards the light at the end of the tunnel.

* It was Claudia Zaslavsky, an ethnomathematician, who suggested that the creator of the tool may have been a woman, tracking the lunar phase in relation to the menstrual cycle.