Spring equinox as actual new year.

Persian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian — a long history of treating this date as the reset. A short argument that we should too.

The spring equinox is not, strictly speaking, a date. It is a moment. The earth tilts neither away from nor towards the sun, day and night are equal, and the hemisphere you happen to be standing on starts the long lean back into light. It has been this way for as long as there has been an earth, which is to say long enough that almost every culture that ever cared about the sky chose this moment, independently, as the start of the year.

The Persians called it Nowruz. The Mesopotamians and Babylonians treated it as the reordering of cosmic balance. The Egyptians lined the Sphinx up so that on this day the sun rose into its gaze, and they were aware — well aware — of the twenty-five-thousand-year procession of the equinoxes through the zodiac, which is the kind of thing it takes patience to notice, and an even longer kind of patience to write down. The Mayans built a pyramid with a serpent of light that descends its stair on this exact afternoon.

Almost every culture that ever cared about the sky chose this moment, independently, as the start of the year.

Compare and contrast: the new year we celebrate now is in the middle of the hemisphere’s deepest darkness or its deepest summer, depending which side of the equator you live on. It commemorates a Roman calendar reform layered on top of a Christian feast layered on top of a winter solstice festival the locals wouldn’t give up. It is a date for inheriting, not for choosing.

The equinox is a date for choosing. The lambs are being made. The birds are starting families. The cycle that has just ended actually ended; the one that starts is genuinely starting. If you are going to ask the body to do a hard thing, this is the time of year the body believes you.

My plan for this one was simple. I rode out, made a fire, drank only tea and electrolytes for a few days, kept the phone in the dry bag, and asked myself two questions. Who was I last winter? And what version of me would the next winter be ashamed of? The answers were the kind that take a long time to have, which is the right kind of answer for a date like this.

You don’t need a bike. You don’t need a fast. You need a quiet hour and a short, specific question. The date does the rest of the work, and the date has been doing this work for a very long time.

A written companion to Spring Equinox Explained on a Royal Enfield Himalayan 450 on the Motorcycle Seat Wisdom YouTube channel.