The Nature of the Present
Awareness begins simply, “I find myself here, now.“
The moment feels immediate, as though it needs no explanation. But as soon as the present is noticed, it reveals itself as something inherited. “Now” is a month, a season, a year. Where did these labels come from? The “now” is not self-contained. It rests on centuries of cultural scaffolding.
This is the shape of path dependence. Once a society sets certain patterns, even arbitrary ones, they persist. Later generations build on them, often forgetting why. What feels natural in the present is influenced by decisions, rituals, and power struggles that have long since settled into tradition. The calendar, with its names and rhythms, makes this visible in a tangible way. This feels like a fruitful place to start. Let’s see how the path leads up to this point.
The Months as We Know Them
From a certain vantage point, from where I stand, there are twelve particular months. Twelve familiar markers of the year. And each one carries the evidence of history:
- January: Named for Janus, the two-faced god of thresholds, looking to the past and the future. A fitting marker for beginnings.
- February: From februa, purification rites before spring. Once the final month of the Roman year.
- March: Dedicated to Mars, god of war, as armies set out after winter. Originally the first month.
- April: Likely from aperire, “to open,” for the opening of blossoms. Another theory links it to Aphrodite.
- May: Named for Maia, an earth goddess of growth and fertility.
- June: Dedicated to Juno, queen of the gods and patron of marriage.
- July: Originally Quintilis (“fifth”), renamed to honor Julius Caesar, who reformed the calendar.
- August: Originally Sextilis (“sixth”), renamed for Augustus, consolidator of Roman power.
- September: From septem (“seven”), though it is now the ninth month.
- October: From octo (“eight”), though now the tenth.
- November: From novem (“nine”), though now the eleventh.
- December: From decem (“ten”), though now the twelfth.
The sequence seems straightforward, but beneath it lies the residue of shifting orders and reforms. Emperors inserted themselves into time. Gods and rituals linger in names still spoken daily. Numbers have slipped out of place but remain unchanged. The months turn in a cycle, repeating endlessly, carrying the past forward into each new year.
How this Calendar Took Shape
The earliest Roman calendar contained ten months, beginning in March and ending in December, leaving winter outside of calculation. Around 713 BCE, King Numa added January and February, anchoring them at the front of the year.
In 46 BCE, Julius Caesar reorganized the system with guidance from Alexandrian Greek astronomers, producing the Julian calendar, a solar year of 365 days with leap years. This reform spread across the empire and endured for centuries.
By the 16th century, small errors in the Julian count had accumulated, misaligning the calendar with the solar year. Pope Gregory XIII corrected this drift in 1582 by removing ten days, creating the Gregorian calendar. Its spread through European power made it the global standard.
Each reform shows how cycles resist and absorb change. The year still turns month by month, season by season, repeating without end, even as the names and structures are reshaped. The circle holds.
Wider Lineages of Timekeeping
The Roman calendar was one among many ways humans have measured the turning of the world. Across cultures, timekeeping grew from the same impulse, to bring human life into rhythm with the larger cycles of nature and belief.
The Egyptians, guided by the Nile’s flood, fixed a solar year of 365 days, its seasons named for the rising and falling of the river. The Babylonians charted lunar cycles that shaped Hebrew and Greek reckonings. In China, a lunisolar system aligned moon and sun through precise solar terms, ensuring agriculture followed the seasons and empire followed the heavens. The Maya interwove solar and ritual calendars into vast repeating rounds, treating time as something that returned rather than passed. Hindu systems joined lunar months to solar years, embedding ritual within cosmic motion. The Islamic calendar, purely lunar, lets months wander through the seasons, a quiet assertion that sacred rhythm need not match the earth’s.
Each of these systems drew meaning from recurrence. Time was never only measurement but memory, an agreement between sky and society, motion and meaning. The present moment, wherever one stands, carries the echo of ancient harmonies.
The Inherited Present
The familiar calendar seems ordinary, a way to mark appointments and holidays. But to say the name of a month is to speak of Janus and Juno, Mars and Maia, Julius and Augustus. It is to recall purifications, blossoms, campaigns, and conquests that left their imprint on the year.
This is the inheritance of now: the present shaped by path dependence and sustained by cycles that turn whether or not we notice them. Each month repeats, but never without memory. Each year circles back, but never as the same year.
And this recognition often comes early for anyone beginning to think beyond the self. The everyday question—Why are the months called this? Why is the year arranged that way?—opens onto a deeper awareness: that we are shaped by cycles and systems older than we can imagine. To see this is to step from solipsism into lineage, from the immediacy of, “I find myself here, now,” into the shared recognition that, “we all find ourselves here, now,” moving together in circles that sustain the present, compose a continuum, and point the way toward a worldview.