Why Does Newness Become Old?

Newness is deviation from normalcy, but when newness becomes sameness, it becomes a way of life, commonplace, not new.

Todd Beal

♦

Normal is good when it maintains stability of truth and structural completeness, but otherwise stifles life itself. Within our families, religions, and societies, we cling to our traditions like blood for the living, and to life habits like drugs for the addicted. We love normal so much, need it so much, that at the expense of a stabile foundation we choose to replace it with sameness – the deathblow to life itself. Sameness is not life, it is not stability; it just feels like it. Life demands, move, change, transform, or die.

If I insist on walking a certain path at a certain time each day of my life, come what may, there will come a day when someone’s very life depends on my walking elsewhere, not according to my routine of safe and “stabile” sameness. One day, just like every day, I walk out the door and check my watch, feel my pulse, and take note of my heartbeat. According to my same previous routine – day after day, year after year – I run the same route, stop at the same drinking stations, say hello and goodbye to the same individuals, and arrive home at the same relative time – just to maintain my sense of normalcy. Later that night while watching the news, I notice a person was killed on the route I would have rather travelled, and also the same time I would have travelled it. But, for the sake of sameness, “stability”, afraid of deviation, I chose to restrict myself and run the same path as always. If I would have just, one time, chosen a different route, I might have intervened and saved a human life.

Wish in one hand… you might say – life happens. Okay then, we also do this with our insistence on believing and behaving a certain way, regardless of the situation. What if – in your zeal to convince someone of truth – you insist on using the same old rhetoric, the same old attitudes, with the same old techniques you have always used, only to later find out that the person with whom you were interacting committed suicide because you chose to indulge safe routine, not his personal needs?

Thus goes the argument against sameness, normalcy – tradition. But what about our need for something new, something different – change – the alternative to same old same old? If you thrive on something new at the expense of something right and good, full of integrity and truly worthwhile, your “need” for newness stifles the very life that everyday sameness snuffs out. Newness is good when it ushers in truth, stability, integrity, right living, but when newness becomes a way of life, it mocks, inhibits, contradicts, the very stability normalcy provides.

New is only new when it replaces the ordinary, and is only good when it replaces the ordinary degradation of true stability. When new then becomes ordinary, it is not new but the same old same old; it is as much the same old stifling inhibition of reality as the very sameness it so adamantly rejects and tries to replace.

Newness is not bad, and neither is normal, providing not either inhibits the progress of integrity, sound structure, completeness, truth.