Should Days Gone By Be Forgotten?

Field Note: For Old Times' Sake

“Miss you already. So glad we got to catch up. I truly appreciate our friendship and love that we can pick back up like no time has passed.”

The text arrived hours after an unlikely reunion. Five of us, scattered by years and geography, ran into each other by chance in the middle of holiday chaos at the Nashville airport. No planning. No warning. Just recognition, laughter, stories, and then the rush back to separate gates and car rentals.

It stayed with me.

Because that feeling, the rare gift of picking up where life left off, is exactly what we sing about every New Year’s Eve, whether we realise it or not.

As midnight approaches every December 31st, the year tilts toward memory. A noisy countdown begins. Smiles spread. Arms cross. And then we do the strangest thing.

We begin singing in a language almost none of us understand.

We sing with confidence and feeling, with warmth and volume, and with very little grasp of the words themselves. It is less a song than a shared act. A communal moment. A slightly uneven prayer, set to a tune we trust.

And we trust it to carry us across the threshold from one year into the next.

Why?

The soft insistence of the old question

The first surprise is simple. The song is not in English.

“Auld Lang Syne” is written in Scots, a sibling language that sounds close enough to feel familiar and distant enough to confuse. We recognise the shapes of the words, but not their meaning.

The phrase we stumble through each year is best translated not as something complex, but as something profoundly ordinary. “For old times’ sake.” “Days gone by.”

That meaning unlocks the song, because the opening line is a question.

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot?”

It is not a real question. It is a gentle insistence. A quiet refusal.

No. What we have lived matters. Who we have loved matters. Time does not erase meaning. Distance does not cancel belonging. The apostle Paul once put it simply: “I thank my God every time I remember you.”

To forget those who carried us is not progress. It is amnesia.

The poet, the folk, and the cup of kindness

Robert Burns is credited with the song, but he was careful to say he did not write it. In the 1780s, he explained that he had taken it down after hearing an old man sing it. A song passed along by breath and memory, not by print.

Burns was not composing. He was preserving.

What he saved was not a rousing anthem or a promise of better days ahead. It was a scene of fellowship that feels almost embarrassingly familiar.

Two old friends. Childhood memories. Distance measured in seas crossed and years endured. Hills climbed. Flowers picked. Life lived.

And then, the centre of the whole thing.

“We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet.”

That is the apex. Not ambition. Not reinvention. Kindness.

The song is not about the future we will conquer. It is about the grace we have already received. It pauses the rush of time long enough to admit that what sustained us was not strength or speed, but people.

Kindness is the only currency that lasts. And we owe a cup to those who spent it on us.

Midnight and the gentle cue to head home

In Scotland, this song became a New Year tradition through Hogmanay, a season when community celebration shifted toward the turning of the year. It fits. Auld Lang Syne is not for starting fresh. It is for honouring what brought us here.

The song’s spread across the world is a historical accident. A Canadian bandleader, Guy Lombardo, played it at the close of every New Year’s Eve broadcast for decades. Families gathered around radios, then around televisions, and the ritual took shape.

Midnight came. The song played. And it stayed.

The final irony may be the most honest of all.

In Japan, the same melody, paired with different words, plays in shops and restaurants to signal closing time. Not a celebration beginning, but a day ending. A gentle cue to gather your things and head home.

Which may be exactly right.

Auld Lang Syne is not about chasing the next thing. It is about recognising that one of the most extraordinary things has already happened.

We are still here. We are still connected. And the memory of love is the one thing worth carrying forward.

It is a moment of gratitude for the grace of the ordinary. Leaning on your neighbour. Crossing your arms. Admitting, without irony, that you would not trade those days gone by for anything.

For old times’ sake.

And for the soul of everything that matters.

Who would you like to reach out to this week, not to remind you, but to offer a simple cup of kindness?