Vignette of a Young Man upon Inventing Something New

Jake Strathmore's personal journal. Entry dated 12 October 2010

This is my journal and I can write whatever I like in it. Today I'm writing something which I hope no one I know ever reads, but at the same time I almost hope someone will read it some day and understand it. I don't expect them to, though, which is why this is my journal.

Newness and freshness have always captivated me. I have always had a particular liking for new things and I've always been drawn by newness and innovation; new words, new stories, new carpets, new papers, new machinery, new music, new equations, new methods, new thoughts. My whole life I've loved nothing more than to be as modern as possible. To me, old things were boring and tedious. Very old things were boring beyond belief and slightly old things were uninteresting. And as new things became old I lost interest in them. I would come across something new and a year later it would be old and boring and I'd forget about it. I was the boy who bought a new iPod every year simply because there was a new iPod to buy. It was not really the things themselves which I liked so much, it was just the very newness of the things which caught my interest.

Also, the thing which I admired most in people was the ability for invention and new ideas. I could never stand historians and old books and things like that. Some people would go on and on about dead people and forgotten places and I'd be bored to tears. There was nothing in the world which annoyed me more than old-fashioned things.

But all that was before today, it was in the past. Now I'm a new person, I appreciate old things.

Today, I invented something new. I had an idea, I took up a pen and paper (I wasn't at home and didn't have access to my brand new computer) and I wrote out my idea. When I finished, I looked at the paper on the table in front of me and I suddenly realized that this idea was entirely new, it hadn't existed before I had written it. I was incredibly proud of myself, here I had accomplished what I most admired in others. Here was something entirely new, never before heard or seen before this moment, written out in my own handwriting. And then, as I sat there gloating to myself about it, I slowly realized something else. A few years from now my new idea wouldn't be so new any more, it'd be old and dated like one of my dad's old floppy disks or my first iPod. Once these things had been new and fascinating, but now, after a few years had passed, they were overshadowed by newer things.

I realized that every old thing which I had spent my life disliking was once as new and fresh as the idea on paper in front of me. The Roman Coliseum had once been the very newest addition to a thriving and busy city, the printing press had once been a breakthrough in technology. There was a time before the internet and a time before the gramophone, a time when horse-drawn carriages were new and a time when zippers were new.

Zippers, I hadn't even thought of them as being old. Strange that a thing so useful could be so new at one time and then less than a century be at the same time so old and so commonplace.

I had thought that bands like AC/DC or Led Zeppelin were old and dated. Now I saw them for what they were, a new and innovative kind of music, the like of which had never been heard in the thousands of years before.

The passage of time presented itself to me. An hour before I was excited and happy and living in the moment; now I'm a little depressed and I can feel the weight of years, not the weight of my own years (which aren't very many), but the weight of all the years since time began. I used to see life as constantly waiting for new stuff, now I see it as a short time in which to contemplate what has gone and what may come (and now my writing style is getting a little more old fashioned).

Strange that in one moment I should have realized so much.
Strange that I should not have realized it before.
Strange that so many people have not yet realized what I now see is obvious.
Stranger still that they might never realize it and will discount my own realization.

I don't know how to tell them, my friends sitting with their new Kindles and iPhones reading the news about the latest movie or scientific breakthrough. How will I tell them that time passes and their new things are just a tiny blip in time, just waiting to become old things and be forgotten along with all the other old things. My friends wouldn't understand this, they couldn't understand it unless they had a revelation like my own.

I have spent nearly twenty years disregarding the past, I plan on spending at least the next twenty trying to remember it.