New Year’s Day promises renewal, then lets it slip away. That fleeting openness may be the point – not a failure, but a reminder about how meaning actually appears in our lives.

New Year’s Day occupies a curious place in Australian cultural life. It’s one of the few public holidays that passes largely uncontested. It’s not religious, not nationalist, and not tied to a historical event that demands reverence or scrutiny. In a very general sense, New Year’s Day is understood as a day of renewal, a symbolic fresh start, even if few people take that language very seriously.

For this reason, the first public holiday of the year is often dismissed as meaningless, a date that marks nothing more than the turning of the calendar, or a day spent dealing with a bad hangover. And yet the holiday is honoured: work, obligation and routine remain suspended.

This tension is revealing. Our attitude to New Year’s Day reveals our desire for renewal while at the same time exposing our difficulty in sitting with the impermanent nature of our lives.

In my own life, I have often felt New Year’s Day quietly acknowledges something about human experience that is otherwise easy to ignore: the sense that something will always remain just out of reach.

In my own life, I have often felt New Year’s Day quietly acknowledges something about human experience that is otherwise easy to ignore: the sense that something will always remain just out of reach.

In Melbourne, cloudless temperate days of warm weather are infrequent, and when they arrive, something stirs that I have never been able to fully name. In the cool pre-dawn air, when the last remaining stars are slowly rinsed from the brightening sky, I feel an unexpected sense of promise. As the earth turns toward the sun, and dew catches the light and briefly sparkles, I feel as though the world is coming into view for the first time. The blue of the sky is deeper than it will be later, dense and luminous. Birds are already active, louder than usual, responding to something that is beyond human explanation: what Romain Rolland called an

© Pearls and Irritations