Having abandoned the natural rhythm of the seasons as our measure of time, we now struggle with the passage from the ‘old year’ to the ‘new year’, characterised by the Christian celebration of Jesus’s putative birthday, a bizarre ritual involving a white-bearded obese man in a red suit and the attendant flogging of stuff, and finally the joyous addition of further carbon emissions to the atmosphere through a worldwide orgy of fireworks and a promise to ourselves that 2012 will be better than 2011.

Meanwhile, our bodies continue to muck along to the ancient tides of nature, occasionally throwing spanners into our intellectual works, especially after the consequences of the 2011/12 champagne kick in.

The tides of nature, especially that first violent flood of adrenaline as we left the womb, have helped attune us to the challenges of this 11-dimensional universe, thankfully viewed usually through our 3D eyes. Despite our emotional and intellectual misgivings that we may not be equipped to deal with it, most of us manage to muddle through. Being clever monkeys we have evolved techniques to help us share the knowledge of coping skills, from oral warning symbols to memorisation of proverbs to the liberating force of typography and now to the visual age and a startling internetconnectedness that once only a few science fiction writers thought possible.

Change, as is often said, has been the one constant – along perhaps with fart jokes – and it is change which is the essence of our challenges. Byron Shire has been pretty lucky in terms of the rate and dimensions of change, although that might not seem so easily discernible from within the bubble. We are not the Filipinos engulfed by a typhoon – fingers crossed. We are not the farmers along the Murray facing a change to water rationing. We are not the victims of Pol Pot nor the tribespeople of Afghanistan strafed by Russian helicopter gunships, nor Vietnamese peasants seared by American napalm, nor the casualties of a thousand and one bad ideas dreamt up by the dark side of the clever monkeys.

History has dealt with the Shire pretty kindly, and there are many advantages to living in a backwater. And yet, that backwater nirvana is always under threat, even by the rate at which we arrive to appreciate it, beginning with the clearing of the Big Scrub from the 1840s on. The challenge of vigilance against that threat – what would you call it? Overdevelopment? Crassness? – is same same but different, as the pressures of population growth increase and the values of ‘sustainability’ are marketed as the latest real estate buzzword.

Assuming the ancient Mayans or their cultist devotees are wrong, there will be plenty more little challenges in 2012. You are not responsible for facing them all single-handed. It is sometimes wise to ‘go placidly amid the noise and haste’ and remember what peace may be found in chickens, er, silence.