Calendars are amongst mankind’s most important standardizations. Taken totally for granted by most it allows us to place events on a commonly used and harmonized timeline. As a mechanism of collaboration standardization of our timeline allows for increased collaborability.
While the calendar has some rather obvious building blocks – like the day (1 spin of earth) and year cycles (1 circle of earth around the sun) – many others are totally arbitrary. For instance: when do we start counting? What is the first year? When is the first day of the year?
Even though the 1st of January is just an arbitrary moment it marks the beginning of a new block, a new cycle of time on the timeline of our calendar. Let’s bury the burdens of the last cycle and advance with a clean sheet and renewed spirits into the next!
Many people have good intentions for the new year. I also have a few but I do not want to bother my readers with them except for one:
As from now I am going to use my own private photo stock – both analogue and digital – to pick the featured images I use to accompany my posts here at Red Planet Dust.
Despite the fact that I am sitting on huge piles of photo’s I have been using my own pictures only very rarely until now. (e.g. example, example, example, example)
To start the new cycle I picked a 50 year old photo of a little boy – you must have guessed: that’s me – and his father on a beach somewhere near Saint Tropez France, presumably taken by his mother.
To me it represents several layers of thought and possible reflection. First of all: it invokes a loving memory of my father who died last year. Secondly I can project my thoughts on how he was as a father: caring, supportive but letting me find my own way.
But more in general to me it also symbolizes the cycle of generations to me. The elder generation taking the new one by the hand, while the younger one is pulling the elder one forwards.
And last but not least, it reminds me of one of the many things my father taught me about photography:
“Even a mundane picture, with apparent photographic flaws
[i.e. in this case the subject is in the dead centre of the frame creating a dull composition, JWM] can become a key picture decades later as you start to see things differently and are able to place it in the larger narrative it is part of.”I wish all my readers – and the other 7 billion people on this earth – a happy new cycle.