Fifth New Year's morning of this notebook, and the ritual now runs itself: ten minutes at the kitchen window while the light comes up, then out into the emptied city, swept streets, confetti in the gutters, the man with the flowers, I am convinced it is the same man, καλή χρονιά all around.

Walking, I did what I do now, I looked for the physics of the day itself. What is a new year, to the universe? And the answer, once you see it, is everywhere and gorgeous: the universe is built almost entirely out of returns.

The Earth has completed another orbit, arriving this morning back at the same neighborhood of its path around the sun, the same place it was last January, and the January before, four and a half billion laps and counting. Nothing about the orbit is new, and nothing about it is old, it is simply the shape the falling makes, forever. The moon returns. The tides return, twice daily, punctual as grandmothers. The seasons return because the tilt persists. Comets leave for centuries and return. Waves return to the beach, breath returns to the body, the swallows return to the eaves of the village house every single spring. Physics does not really do straight lines, I have learned. Left alone, the universe curls everything into cycles, and what looks like repetition is actually the deepest kind of reliability: the cosmos keeping its appointments.

And not one of those returns is a failure to progress. That is the thought that stopped me on the corner by the bakery, bread horn in hand. We speak of going in circles as defeat. The universe speaks of orbits as achievement, the only stable arrangement there is, the thing that does not fly apart. The Earth is not stuck because it came back. The coming back is the design.

Five years ago, entry one promised to take the world apart and see how it works. The notebook since then looks, from a distance, like a straight line of discoveries, starlight to entropy to gravity to meaning. Up close, I know the truth: it was orbits. I returned to the same handful of truths over and over, each lap from a slightly different height. Everything settles when you stop disturbing it, that one I have now written, by my count, eleven ways. Both clocks are right. The stars are not gone, only outshone. Old light arrives and can be watched kindly. Each return felt, at the time, suspiciously like repetition. Stacked, they turn out to be a spiral: same coordinates, higher altitude, better view.

So no resolutions this year, only the one that contains the others, borrowed from the sky. Begin again. Sit the ten minutes, again. Walk out under the old light, again. Return to the same loves, the same table, the same keys of the same piano, the same handful of truths, and trust the spiral: you never come back to quite the same place, because the you that returns has been somewhere in the meantime.

The universe has been beginning again, gorgeously, without embarrassment, for fourteen billion years. It is the most experienced beginner there is, and this morning, with confetti in the gutters and the year zero minutes old, we are all its apprentices.

Καλή χρονιά. Same time next lap. I will be here, at the window, beginning.