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 “oceanic feeling”, a sense of being in tune with nature as a larger whole.

In this state even familiar scenes appear altered. Telegraph poles soar up into the blueness like steeples. Letter boxes shine with anticipation. Nondescript modern cars are briefly personalised with sprinkles of sunlight. Weary middle-aged men saunter rather than shuffle toward the service station for their morning paper and coffee. On mornings like this, I try to remain outdoors as long as I can, reluctant to break the spell.

And then, sometime around one or two in the afternoon, it fades. Nothing obvious has changed. The sun has not disappeared. The weather has not turned. Yet the day feels tired. The crispness has gone. The promise that gathered through the morning quietly withdraws, not from me alone, but from the day itself.

Mrs Dalloway_,_ “what a morning – fresh as if issued to children on a beach.” I would then walk for hours, refusing to stop for coffee or enter shops, as though movement itself might hold the feeling in place. I would wander into unfamiliar streets, feeling an immense sense of longing and expectation. There was something all around me that I was almost able to capture in its entirety. But not quite. I would walk faster and stray further and further into sections of London that I did not know. What was that sun-kissed patch of grass that I could see on the horizon? Another park that I did not know? Once I get there, everything will be perfect. Only then will I stop. But I never did. I would keep pressing onwards, until I could feel my legs stiffen and protest, like they wanted to turn to stone. I never knew exactly where I was going. There were no mobile phones back then. And the A-to-Z London map was always too bulky to fit into my pocket.

The tiredness arrived not as exhaustion, although that was true in some sense, but as atmosphere. The traffic would thicken, the noise would become noticeable, and the sense of openness would vanish. The day would be deflated and I would realise I had once again lost what I was searching for. Yet the sense of enchantment and promise I had felt in the morning would stay with me for days, sometimes weeks. This made life worth living. And yet this feeling is always alloyed with frustration. This ritual is replayed every New Year’s Day in the familiar cycle of resolution and quiet abandonment, where a sense of expectation and connection to something larger than oneself is lost in the humdrum pitter patter of the rest of the year.

Colin Wilson describes the experience he would get as a child when passing a large body of water: “a curious, deep longing for the water that would certainly not be satisfied by drinking it or swimming in it.” It is a form of “un-achievableness”, a longing that cannot be satisfied by possession or use. He refers to CS Lewis’ evocation of something similar in his childhood response to Autumn, when the smell of smoke, damp grass, and falling leaves produced a desire that pointed beyond fulfilment. What both these accounts point to is the all too human experience where meaning appears, intensifies, and then withdraws.

New Year’s Day makes this pattern unusually visible. Like the moments I experienced walking through London, and like the longing described by Wilson and Lewis, something presents itself and then resists being captured. There is no clear object to reach, no point at which the experience can be completed. The sense of openness that gathers through the morning is provisional, and its disappearance is not a failure of attention or resolve but part of its nature. Because it cannot be made permanent, it is often dismissed as trivial or illusory. Yet New Year’s Day embodies this elusive quality of uncontainable enchantment, even as we try to deny it by converting a fleeting sense of wonder into resolutions aimed at permanent change.

Experiences of this kind sit uneasily within modern ways of thinking. Because they do not offer instruction, clarity, or durability, they resist being translated into goals or outcomes. Yet it is precisely this resistance that gives them their force, and that makes our habitual response to New Year’s Day feel so misdirected.

One of the most memorable figures of Western literature is Faust, who is emblematic of this impulse. His tragedy does not lie in wanting too much, but in wanting the moment to last. Goethe has him selling his soul to the devil, Mephistopheles, the instant he imagines saying, “Verweile doch! Du bist so schön!” (“Stay a while! You are so beautiful”). To ask time to stop is an impossible abstraction that only the devil can perform, and if Goethe’s account is anything to go by, not very satisfactorily.

New Year’s Day addresses this longing for the impossible. It is widely framed as a fresh start, a moment when the year might be reshaped or redeemed. Yet this expectation easily curdles into disappointment. The openness of the day gives way to routine, and the failure to preserve that openness is experienced as personal inadequacy. The problem is not that the promise fades, but that we expect it not to.

In a culture where alcohol has long functioned as a social lubricant and emotional accelerator, the Faustian desire to sustain the moment is played out quite literally. New Year’s Eve makes this impulse visible in exaggerated form. Another drink postpones the return of time. The music, the company, even a poorly attended gathering feels temporarily sufficient. Imperfection is tolerated. Thrownness feels bearable. The problem is not the desire for this feeling, but the attempt to hold it indefinitely.

New Year’s Day offers something quieter. It does not promise mastery or redemption. It gestures toward a more mature recognition: that meaning need not be permanent to be real.

Perhaps this is why New Year’s Day endures. Each time it returns, it offers an opportunity to loosen our grip on the childish wish that life should remain at its peak, that the enchanted morning should last forever. If there is a form of renewal worth taking seriously, it lies not in overcoming impermanence, but in learning, slowly and imperfectly, to live within it. That may not be something to celebrate, but it may be something worthy of a holiday.