Have you ever thought of Midnight as a threshold?
As a momentary bridge even, that connects yet separates one day from the next? Once you cross that bridge, once your second foot passes that threshold, you are locked out of the previous day forever. Today instantly becomes yesterday. Tomorrow becomes today. And Midnight decides exactly when.
Midnight: it is no more than a specific arrangement of man-made time, when the hour hand and the minute hand and the second hand are aligned and all point upward, when the numbers on the screen go blank fleetingly, reading 00:00:00. Astronomically, Midnight is irrelevant, because our planet does not follow or rely on an artificial computation of time to complete one full rotation around its axis (indeed, the opposite is true). Geographically, it is also irrelevant, because midnight somewhere on Earth is 7:00pm somewhere else, and 8:00am in another place. Psychologically, too, we ignore it, attaching excitement to that instance only in relation to the New Year or, say, a special person’s birthday.
Yet beyond the astronomy, beyond the geography, and beyond our psychology, Midnight remains a gatekeeper that asks no questions and discriminates against no one. A benign checkpoint with a ruthless guard. Succeed in approaching Midnight with your existence, and it will let you pass into the new day with no hesitation. Be mindful, however; once you do pass, it will apathetically block you from taking a step back. A fair, if cold-hearted tradeoff arguably in favor of the passenger, where an expired and exhausted day is handed in for another full allowance of 24 hours – much like trading in your phone with a dead battery and instantly receiving a new one, fully charged. Who can say no?
The jurisdiction of Midnight exceeds far beyond the realm of human physical existence. Time itself succumbs to this powerful moment. Creeping under the sword of Midnight, Time too changes its clothes, for it is Midnight that passes verdict what year Time wears. Midnight strikes with the second hand, and an entire decade passes into oblivion, an entire millennium is left reduced into fodder for history. Such is the might of Midnight.
We have no one to blame and no one to thank for its benevolence and its stoicism other than ourselves, for creating the artificial construct of calibrated time, choosing a specific split-second as its crown jewel, and trusting it with the task of regulating access, with a heavy hand, to the basic chronometric building block of our existence: the day.
What a beautiful phenomenon it is, this Midnight.
Chronicles 