Celebrating the New Year and welcoming it has deeper implications than choosing wine and making a Russian salad. The idea that a year ends at some point and then a new one begins originates from ancient epochs and is an integral part of the understanding of time as cyclical, as a vast, perhaps endless, series of universes, lives and years, which arise, last and end, only to begin again. started with or without a certain break
Winter has just begun. In the world before climate change, everything was quiet and white at this time of year, outside the cities even empty (and cities, historically speaking, are a completely new phenomenon). The next three months will be a great challenge for endurance and health, even for those who did not fast for six weeks before Christmas. The human need to escape from the near-death grip of winter is best seen in the fact that it begins holidays and unbearable with noise, and in insisting on holidays that are either not, or have been misunderstood or forcibly placed at the wrong time.
Celebrating the New Year and welcoming it has deeper implications than choosing wine and making a Russian salad. The idea that at some point a year ends and then a new one begins originates from ancient epochs and is an integral part of understanding time as cyclical, as a vast, perhaps endless, series of universes, lives and years that arise, last and end, only to begin again with or without a certain pause. Reincarnation teachings are a typical example of unverifiable forms of this belief. But even without any predilection for theology or cosmogony, people must have noticed early on that the seasons changed cyclically in a pattern that then had very little variation. They planned, prepared, hoped through experience of regular weather patterns (including flooding of the Nile), before it was clear to them that the earth moves around the sun and that its path is not a regular circle.
The fundamental illogicality of this process is immediately clear. If you look at the world this way, the beginning of the year should be at the beginning of the renewal of nature, that is, in the spring, so the New Year should be celebrated on one of the last days of March or even in April - whatever we decide. It is interesting that the Latin names for the months show that it used to be exactly like that, since "September" simply means the seventh month (although now it is the ninth), October is the eighth, November is the ninth, December is the tenth. In the Romance languages (including many others), the names and order have been kept, only the beginning has been moved. What happened?
Julius Caesar happened. When he decided to reform the calendar, Caesar judged that the beginning of the year should be moved. He chose the beginning of January not for astronomical reasons, but because that month was named after the god Janus, a two-faced deity with another face on the back of his head, a god who symbolized to the Romans a simultaneous ending and a new beginning. Caesar was killed the very next year, in March, but there is no evidence that the conspirators were members of some old-old-calendar sect. The custom then spread throughout the world and now we all follow it, without asking where it comes from and what its meaning is.
Celebrating in December is no small challenge. As fresh food is very scarce, you have to be creative and, for example, bake bread with dried fruit; since everything in nature is monochromatic, you put multi-colored decorations in every corner of the house, bring in branches or whole trees that you decorate with different decorations (this originally Jewish custom has also forgotten its roots); when everything in nature is quiet, people start making noise. In recent times, particularly unusual, colorful and noisy fireworks are made all over the world, millions of firecrackers are used, and in some regions, including Serbia, firearms are also fired. All of this is pointless and potentially dangerous, even if you consider that gun ownership has been seen for centuries as an indicator of freedom and defensive power.
Everything is more complicated with Christmas, and with its celebrations more absurd. According to some interpretations, Christmas is the most important Christian holiday (since there can be no Easter without Christmas). He celebrates the birth of a boy whose mother is Jewish and who is circumcised and brought into the temple - sometimes he was hungry, angry and in pain. But this boy, Christians believe, became the Savior, because he actually represents the incarnation of God the Logos, that "word" from the very beginning of the "Book of Genesis". God, who was believed to dwell in zones inaccessible to the human mind, now appears among men, in his two natures and with two personalities, as the God-man.
Don't worry that you don't understand and can't imagine any of this. (Some even think that the point is precisely that this remains unfathomable to people). For the subject of this text, the only important thing is that Christmas celebrates the moment when the Christian God, who is the beginning and the end of everything, took upon himself an earthly, mortal form in order to restore meaning and peace among people and in the entire universe. Therefore, Christmas is primarily a holiday of peace, reconciliation and forgiveness. This is explicitly mentioned in the traditional greeting, for which Serbian also uses the expression "peace be upon you".
The question is now quite obvious: when celebrating the holiday of space peace, why shoot? How do guns and firecrackers fit into that peace? Isn't it immediately clear that they are violating it and giving the impression of an attempt to sabotage the holiday that is supposedly being celebrated; shouldn't such a day be spent in peace and quiet, prayer and contemplation, making peace and saying goodbye? Maybe even in reading books that explain the meaning of Christmas?
There are more contradictions regarding these holidays, primarily that many people celebrate both, and their conceptions are fundamentally different (the Christian understanding of time is linear, not cyclical; Christianity is not focused on nature, but on faith in a supernatural overcoming of nature). But the point of this text is something else and potentially very dangerous. Namely, the biggest pollution on the planet, despite the deadly climate changes, is brought by noise, now more and more present and inevitable in our daily lives. Noise is a great enemy of our health that we hardly ever think about, and the holidays at the beginning of winter bring it to its peak.
The explanation for this is, as expected, the same as always. During the evolution of the human species, noise was a signal of danger and people encountered it very rarely. The sounds of nature could be heard, but few of them were particularly loud - such as thunder, the roar of dangerous beasts, the falling of trees. As a rule, they all lead to fear, and for some religious rituals were devised.
This state of affairs lasted for a very long time. The sounds of nature were harmonious and predictable, there were few people, later bells were heard here and there. The first complaints of street noise being heard in homes come from American cities at the beginning of the twentieth century. This basically means that the number of cars has increased enough that people hear them multiple times a day or almost all the time. This begins to affect concentration and the experience of intimacy, the boundaries of private space, but it is still not an acute problem.
Everything is getting worse with the advent of telephones, televisions and various devices for listening to music. The noise is growing outside, because the number of vehicles is inexorably increasing, but it is now also growing inside our homes. Not only the mechanical sounds of machines are heard, but also the voices of numerous people we don't know, and the silence disappears. For many, the situation is the same even at night, when (they should) sleep.
The danger is not immediately obvious. When the noise is sudden, the reaction is strong, but usually short-lived. Babies and small children cry at a loud sound that adults clearly do not carry any danger (in the first part of the feature-length cartoon In my head, Sadness explains to Joy that the greatest fears are stored in the unconscious, and the first thing that hits the two of them when they step into the unconscious is the "forest" of broccoli and the sound of grandma's vacuum cleaner), but that usually stops as soon as the noise ends. It is similar with animals, whose nervous systems are more excitable than ours, so they react violently to a sudden sound even when there is objectively no danger. Children with autism and their parents are especially sensitive to firecrackers, gunshots and other noise; that kind of noise can lead to heart attacks and other deadly consequences.
This, however, is also mine. There are bigger problems with repetitive, long-lasting noise. The reason for this is the capacity of our nervous system to adapt and "turn off" repeated stimuli, so it seems that they do not affect us. If you've ever fallen asleep on a plane, you know what I mean. And if that seems like an extreme example to you, try any of the many free apps that show how much noise (expressed in decibels) there is around you and you'll see how easily that needle enters the red zone, which is dangerous to our health.
The point of this whole story is that our nervous system can "turn off" the noise, but the cardiovascular system cannot. People who work behind large machines, at airports, in subways, manage to concentrate and complete their tasks. The price they pay is enormous tension, heart disease, general exhaustion, serious sleep disturbances. If you haven't been scared yet, here are some numbers: people constantly exposed to traffic noise have a 72 percent higher risk of heart attack, and noise is estimated to be behind three percent of deaths from cardiovascular diseases, which in Europe corresponds to the number of over two hundred thousand deaths per year.
The number of people who speak and write about this is extremely small, and the danger is growing more and more. Above all, even when we are not exposed to noise, hardly anyone dedicates himself to silence and silence for a long time. Getting to know your own inner voice without the influence of other people's singing, books or interviews is very limited. Expressing yourself without using words is even rarer. And when you are in silence, when you do nothing, your brain, as shown by new neuroscientific studies, extremely actively processes impressions from social interaction that you did not have the opportunity to process before, which is extremely important for your further personal and social functioning.
That's why you should use every moment, including winter holidays and vacations, to go out into nature, enjoy silence, get to know yourself and important others. And as far as gunpowder is concerned, everything is the other way around - the less, the better.
The author is a psychologist
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