New Year

     We’ve been getting and sending a lot of holiday greetings, but one we have yet to hear is: “Have a Very New Year!” Perhaps it sounds too ambiguous [æmˈbiɡjuəs](含糊不清的，模糊的）for a real felicitation（祝贺，祝词）; safer to wish upon each other happiness rather than newness. But what if the newness of the new year was more than a calendrical（日历的) trope [trəup]（转义，比喻）? What if we rolled into(走入） January as if we were rolling into undiscovered country — ties cut, wagons（（一般由马拉的）四轮运货车） loaded（（车辆或容器）装满的）, oxen（公牛） hitched（将（动物）套上车）?

      For all of the toasts and vows, it is easy to dismiss（消除，排除） the new year as an artificial made-for-Champagne-purveyors（承办者，供应商） boundary（界限）. If we move past it — and our limited resolutions（（做某事的）决心） — quickly it is because life has a profound continuity that has little reference to the calendar’s pages. For most of us, time falls into different, and largely private, patterns. It’s more natural to measure time by how long you’ve lived in the same apartment or worked at a job, how long a relationship has endured and how old the children have grown, how large the trees you planted years ago have gotten.

      That’s one thing the new year always offers: a look back across the plains（大草原） into the past before we move onward into the future. It is a holiday that insists upon our temporality（一时，暂时，无常） and reminds us that time is, in fact, the strangest thing. No one ever sat you down（使你坐下）, when you were young, and explained the workings（（系统，设备，组织等的）工作方式，运行方式） of time the way the safe way to cross a street was explained. You just grew into（学者适应（某个工作或某种情形） it, into the way we trail the past behind （慢吞吞地走（在后面））us while the future comes rushing forward（向前冲，向前跑）.

      It also offers possibility. We’re all surging forward（迅速涌动，蜂拥向前） — some with more impetus [ˈimpitəs]（动力）than others. And now we have 2011 before us, a year that seemed unimaginable（难以想象的） until we were right（就在（某个位置或地方） at its border（在它的边界上）.