Friday, January 1, 2010

the new year

Welcome 2010.
And so another year passes, and what mark has really been made? Can we truly say yesterday was a yesteryear and we've moved past the implicit ignorance and mistakes we try to associate with 2009? I don't think it works that way. Today is much like yesterday, identical almost. Just as today is a striking resemblance to 200 years ago, minus the outfits and idioms. But none the less, it's very similar.
We're often victims of "ancientism", this mindset that our time period/generation is any greater than the last. This must have been the same mindset that the Greeks and Romans had viewed their society in, and the Israelites long before them. There is no more progressive or engineering time than the current age, but how many current ages have there been?
Society as a whole functions in much the same way as it always has, despite the year mark. We'll wake up tomorrow and find 2010 to be our new and improved 2009. We'll find the end of this year just as controversial and superior as the last had been. It's the movement of time, the pertinence imputed to the present age.
The wind will blow in the same direction today. The television will use the same remote and old, thumbed-through novels will still flip open to the familiar pages of broken binding that they did a month ago. The only thing that will ever look any different, sound any different, or hold any visage of newness is us. We will change. Even today we are another person than who we had been yesterday. If for no other reason, because we know the promise of 2011--that we will see change and we will be affected by it. Change lies within us. Let us mark our years by that.

1 comment:

  1. this is so good.
    it makes me wish I didn't write like a 3rd grader

    ReplyDelete