Winter Solstice - A Day of Hope

 

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.” — Edith Sitwell

Arun Kumar

Thursday, Dec. 21, 2023, marks the day of the winter solstice, which is also the official start of winter in the US.

As a first-generation immigrant living here, it initially made little sense to me. I had been braving the cold since mid-October, and yet, winter is only just beginning. It felt as though those months of cold did not count.

But for me, the winter solstice is not the start but the end of winter.

The idea that winter starts on the day of the winter solstice is tied to the fact that the coldest days and months are still ahead. For some, it signifies the need to brace for visits from the polar express, blizzards, ice storms, and a twenty-day stretch of fog.

Besides gloom and doom of weather ahead, the arrival of the winter solstice is still day of hope for me. It is an important psychological landmark that from this day on, the length of daylight WILL NOT BE GETTING ANY SHORTER. I could not have said it any louder.

From this day forward, the length of daylight will creep upward by a few minutes a day initially, and then, at an ever-accelerating pace. About forty days from now by the end of January the length of daylight will be forty-nine minutes longer. For me, the prospect of longer days is a much more cheerful thought and holds the strength to overcome the negativity of coldest days being still ahead of us.

Winter solstice is a symbol that the worst is over. It symbolizes that we hit the bottom, and although the journey to the surface would be slow, and the sense of the comfort of days with longer duration of daylight will take a while to set in, the universe is now moving in the correct direction.

The winter solstice also brings with it the promise of another spring down the road, and universe willing, I will be around to enjoy the freedom of summer once again.

It is not that I do not like winter. I do. Winter is a wonderful time for introspection. It is a time when by the time December 21 arrives, the sun is already setting behind the bare trees by 5 pm and as the darkness sets in, it feels like I am safe inside the cocoon and the safety our home has to offer.

There may still be three more months of winter, and I may have to shovel snow, a task I’m not particularly fond of, but on the winter solstice, I know that each day will bring additional minutes of daylight. That thought alone is enough moral support to get me through the next three months of colder temperatures, gray days, and snow.

I hope you do not think I am odd for suggesting that today, rather than marking the start of winter, symbolizes its end. But if I do come across as such, I hope that somewhere in your mind, you can appreciate the psychological significance of the winter solstice and relate to my perspective.

Winter solstice is the day when being in the depths of darkness, the only way forward is towards more light. For what more one can hope?

Ciao.

Do we or do we not have choices? Should I ponder?

 Free will: Do we or do we not have choices, that may be a question, but is it worth pondering?

Arun Kumar

It is a brilliant crisp day in autumn; a day of unparalleled beauty and serenity, with nature orchestrating a breathtaking palette of colors (and also emotions). The air is filled with a refreshing crispness that invigorates the senses and carries an aroma of fallen leaves that only autumn can bring.

Looking upward one sees the sky with a flawless shade of blue. The slanting rays of sunlight fall on everything in a warm, golden glow, casting long, enchanting shadows on the ground.

The trees, draped in color, stand proudly in the backdrop of the blue sky.

In this brilliance of an autumn afternoon, sitting in a car, I am driving listening to a psychology podcast and the topic is free will. The podcasters and his guest are discussing whether we have free will or whether we don’t.

It is obviously an important topic with implications for who bears the moral responsibility for actions, and by extension for the legal system as to how punishments should be framed.

Free will is also important for the smooth functioning of society. It is easier to manage a society and put checks and balances in place with the premise of free will as the foundation (à la, you made the choice to take the action, and hence, you are responsible). Try managing a social structure when people are not responsible for their actions would be a nightmare.

Listening to two people talk on the podcast, debate, and banter (often acrimoniously) various nuances behind the notion of free will, I am beginning to wonder who really cares about the subject matter. What segment of human society at this moment is thinking about the question of free will.

Entangled is that question is also the notion of equity. What fraction of humanity even has the wherewithal to ponder over such matters?

Given the reality of living and the amount of mental and physical resources it takes to keep our head above water, in large parts of the global population, people do not have the luxury to dwell on such issues.

It is not unlike the instance when I had realized that drinking a cup of earl gray on a winter morning with my hands wrapped around a warm cup hides a lot more to it. My ability to do so is an outcrop of inequality; not many have the luxury to do so.

Even in the developed countries where people have financial wherewithal and have the luxury of discretionary time, it is so much easier to follow the path that requires least resistance than wondering about free will and its consequences.

Urges to contemplate free will get trumped by the ease of engaging in social media, for example.

The podcast drags on, the discussion drifts into places that do not seem to be of any relevance to 99.9% of humanity. I am getting close to my destination and have to get off at the next exit and navigate through the neighborhood roads to get to where I need to be.

To focus, I reach out and turn off the podcast. Perhaps that was an act of my free will.

Our protagonists on the podcast can continue debating about free will in the ether. I have an appointment to keep, and it is more important than pondering whether I do or don’t have free will. If I am late, and the penalty I have to pay as a consequence is weightier than the question of free will.

With or without free will, clocks will keep ticking, time will keep its unidirectional march, and I will remain mortal and will confront its consequences. Perhaps in another time and place the question of “free will” will hold a higher significance.

But, it is not so today.

Ciao.

Natalie asked, where should I go next?

 

It was the morning after the wedding

that went late into the night.

The floor told the story

of the nocturnal celebration

with a scattering of

petals of red roses

and of yellow marigolds,

some crushed, some bruised,

while some others

survived untouched, by sheer luck.

Looking at the empty hall,

Natalie, the event organizer, wondered,

"Now that this is over,

where should I go next?"

Have you looked at life displayed on a postcard?

 

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana

Arun Kumar

80-year life in weeks

How many methods are there to measure time? Let us count the ways.

Time it takes for the Earth to rotate once around its axis. A day.

Time it takes for the moon to go around the Earth. A month.

Time it takes for the Earth to go around the sun. A year.

Or if one wants to get esoteric, and precise, then the span over which 9,192,631,770 transitions between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Cesium-133 atom occurs is the universal standard for a second. Go figure, whatever that means. Understanding that will take too many hours of my time!

Somewhere along the trajectory of human civilization a day got divided into twenty-four hours, an hour into 60 minutes, a minute into 60 seconds. These numbers seem arbitrary as they are not related to (periodic) movement of celestial bodies which are a natural way to measure time.

A little help from Bing tells that the origin of 24 hours in a day, or 60 seconds in an hour came from Babylonians and Egyptians.

The Babylonians, around 2,000 BCE, used a base-60 numbering system known as the sexagesimal system, which probably is the origin of dividing an hour into 60 minutes.

The ancient Egyptians are credited to the division of the day into 24 hours. They used sundials and water clocks (clepsydra) to track the passage of time. The day was divided into ten hours of daylight and ten hours of night, with two twilight hours added at the beginning and end of the day.

Slowly, the 24-hour day became more standardized and widely adopted in the Roman period and has persisted and remains the standard for measuring time in many cultures around the world.

Then there are various notions of time that depend on disciplines of knowledge — Geological time (eons, eras, periods, epochs); Biological time (lifespans of organisms, growth rates, heart beat per second, circadian rhythms, evolutionary time); Economic measures of time (financial years, quarters) Climate measures of time (solar cycle, oscillations in climate data on years, decades, centuries, or even millennia).

Among all the ways to either measure or conceptualize time, time also has the weirdness of being a subjective experience and varies from person-to-person and also varies within one’s life. Our perception of the passage of time, and how we process and remember events, is truly a mind bending experience.

Time can drag on when bored or anxious; it flies when engaged in enjoyable activities. One can also get into the flow and lose the notion of time altogether.

This subjective time dilation or contraction can make it seem as though time does not always flow at a consistent rate. Sometimes it goes bananas!

There is also a feeling that time seems to pass more quickly and goes through “time compression” as we get older. When we are young, a year might represent a larger portion of life we had, making it seem longer. As we get older, each year becomes a smaller percentage of our total life, leading to the perception that time is passing more quickly.

Exponential changes in technology and cultural shifts have also contributed to a perception of time passing quickly. The increasing flow of information and the increasing pace of modern life may also create the impression that time is moving faster.

All these examples point to an often distorted perception of time. One weird distortion is that month seems to fly by (and before you know, it is time to pay bills again) while a year seems quite long.

At other times, a year seems to go in a hurry, and yet, years of childhood seem to be eons away. Trying to imagine ourselves 50-years ago might as well be trying to peek before the Big Bang.

One of the most bizarre aspects of time is that if one counts life in number of years vs. number of days, they create a different impressions for how long we are going to live. Living 80 years feels like an adequate life span but living for 29,200 days, ummm, not so much.

I guess measuring life in the number of days is a weird concept. We do not go around saying that an acquaintance is 32,850 days old now.

For that matter, looking at the lifespan in the number of weeks all laid out on a page just feels creepy. An entire life laid out on a half sheet of paper; that is all we get to live?

Now that I am older, there is also a tendency to begin to look at life based on different measures. Being in the middle of my sixties, a thought comes that I would perhaps see our son 20–30 more times and that becomes an awfully small measure of time and also a depressing and disconcerting thought.

On the same lines, perhaps I will see my sister in India five more times or less. The measure of life becomes even smaller.

Measuring time in how few instances you have left to repeat something makes the heart skip a few beats.

It also makes you realize how short our remaining existence is.

So yes, there are many objective and subjective ways to measure time and within those options certain ways of perceiving time make us look at our existence through a different set of glasses.

Some of those glasses have a way of magnifying mortality.

Ciao.