By Nathan Bierma
January 1, 2000
 
As wild as the air is each New Year's Eve, and as wilder as it was last night at the turn of the millennium, it is sobering to experience the calm of New Year's morning.  Especially today, the first day of the next thousand years.  It feels, well, a lot like any day of the last thousand years.

The sun falls on to the street outside my window with no more force or facade than it did each day in 1999.  The furniture in my house and the trees outside it rest idly, with the same blank expression they always wear, oblivious to the millennial milestone they just witnessed.  The familiarity of the setting belies the historical milestone my calendar insists just passed. 

The quiet of the morning is interrupted by the squeak in the floor in the same place and with the same moderate volume as before.  The aroma of burnt toast still nudges my nostrils, the morning gaze out the window is as simultaneously refreshing and unremarkable as ever.

The more things change...

Thinking about the future is always done at the highest possible pitch. The more dramatic the jump ahead in time, the higher the decibels.

Futuristic thinking is often a version of "The Jetsons," dominated by flying cars, robotic servants, automatic this and that.  That's far from the significance of the future, and as I sense this quiet morning, from its reality.

Time has not sped up, after all.  Midnight took no less and no more than a second to come last night, as it does when it marks the passing of a mid-month Tuesday to Wednesday, with no atypical tour de force to do justice to today's place in history.

And the fact is, as different, top to bottom, as the world in 1999 was from the world in 999, it still took a milllennium to get there.  New Year's Day 1000 was just an inch ahead into time, not a leap. The same is true of New Year's Day 2000. It contains no more acceleration than New Year's Day 1999.

That's partly why, I think, all the millennium hype rang so hollow so quickly, at least once we had the assurance that our machines wouldn't turn against us.  We knew nothing was drastically, tangibly going to change, except on our calendars.

Of course, the New Year is annual occasion for resolutions, a cause for new hope.  We are eager to wash our hands of our mistakes, regrets, and disappointments, and bask in the illusion that we are not on a collision course with a new, equally sizable batch.  That sense is dramatically heightened when a fresh 1,000 years lie before us, rather than the standard one.

But each year we are reminded, and this year the reminder hits with greater force, that however much we have the illusion of new beginnings, we remain ever encumbered by the old.  The future never plays the just-bathed dog shaking itself dry, ejecting droplets of the past far from memory.  Thus the overpowering sense of familiarity this morning.

It is a new day, and perhaps that is all the sense of rebirth we are entitled to today. Perhaps it is all we need.  What the numbers on our calendars fail to relate is that there are no actual beginnings and endings as these historical monumental milestones suggest, just one long process, whose unpredictable nuances and changes challenge us every day, not just the first day of the new millennium.

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