All the Calendars

How many calendars do you have? Of course there’s the one on your computer, the one that keeps track of all the meetings and tasks you need to plan for in a day or a week or longer. If you’re like me, you also have a paper calendar where you keep notes and odds and ends of information you don’t want to lose track of and perhaps meetings and details you don’t want on a more public work calendar. If you have multiple family members, you may have a calendar in some communal space like the refrigerator door.  All in an attempt to keep track of everything we have going on.

It turns out there are other ways to think about calendars. And yes, I fell down an internet rabbit hole here and I’ll spare you some of what I found. There are four types of calendars: solar, lunar, luni-solar and sidereal.* Solar calendars, based on the sun, are designed so that the seasons happen at the same time each year for thousands of years. Lunar calendars are based on the cycles of the moon and are not connected to the seasons so the cycle over multiple years is much longer than the single year. The luni-solar calendar attempts to reconcile the two and the explanation of the calculations needed to figure this is incomprehensible to me. The fourth calendar is the sidereal which is based on the movement of the stars.

Mostly we don’t have to pay attention to these calendars, but we do pay attention to two others – the astronomical and the meteorological. Here’s a description of these two:

• “The astronomical start of a season depends on the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun. More specifically, either a solstice (for winter and summer) or an equinox (for spring and autumn) marks the start of each season.
• In contrast, the meteorological start of a season relies on the annual temperature cycle and the 12-month calendar. Each season starts on the first day of a specific month and goes on for three months. Spring starts on March 1, summer on June 1, autumn on September 1, and winter on December 1.”**

I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that the solstices and equinoxes seem to be off from how we experience the seasons. Some of this I suspect will vary depending on how far north or south a person lives within their hemisphere. When my family first moved to San Antonio in 1970, I learned that we had two seasons  – summer and January/February. Neither of these two types of calendars match the lived experience of people in Central and South Texas because fall most definitely does not begin on September 1 or even at the fall equinox later in the month.

But there’s another calendar that we all live by, even if we don’t work on campus and we don’t have kids in school. That’s the academic calendar. For decades, I’ve considered the start of fall to be synchronous with the start of the academic year. While I was on campus, the academic year began with the arrival of the Resident Assistants on campus. Now, since we live next to a middle school, the academic year begins with the appearance of the morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up lines that make it difficult to turn out of our neighborhood. It’s definitely the start of the academic year.

Calendars are important, useful tools. They help us predict the future – from weather to the need to send a birthday card. They help us prioritize and keep our promises because we remembered to write down when we said yes to an invitation. They can help us find time to do what’s important. One of the exercises for people who are feeling like they are having trouble with their priorities is to do a calendar review. If it’s not written down on the calendar, it can be easy to skip people and activities when life gets hectic.

It’s also possible for a calendar to become a bit of a tyrant. If it’s too full, there’s no time for serendipity and the unexpected. Whether or not you, like me, think this is the start of a new year, the start of the academic year is a good time to do that calendar review.

Have you filled all the spots with work or other people’s priorities? Are there spaces that are open for time to think, time to play, time to have a chat with a friend? What do you want to make time for this fall, no matter when it starts according to any calendar? Whatever version of calendar you use, I hope you’re making it work for you rather than the other way around this year.

Take care,

Gage

*https://www.rmg.co.uk/sites/default/files/Calendars-from-around-the-world.pdf
**https://www.almanac.com/content/first-day-seasons