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Hop Scotch
Creating or doing something new creates real strength and is an important obstacle to overcome.
Date published: 5/8/2008
NEWNESS needs audac- ity. I was thinking about this during an Instant Messenger conversation with a good friend of mine from high school a few nights ago. He had just started making music full time and was falling in love with it.
"Man," he said, "there's so much to making music. There's the stuff I want to do, the stuff I've done, and then, the stuff that nobody has done before. And that last kind is kind of tough to pull off."
Doing things that haven't been done before is tough. Why? Convention is comfortable--and it's nice in any creative setting to feel like you have established rules and people to refer back to. Every now and then, though, there comes a need in any culture for new ways of looking at everything. The world has to turn upside down again and re-correct its excesses.
Newness has always been a major addiction in my life. Growing up in a Navy family, I went to seven different schools from Florida to Maine, and my education was punctuated by fresh start after fresh start. My mom traveled from California to Virginia and several stops in between when she was growing up. And my dad jumped into the Navy younger than I am now and did a tour of the world. It's kind of in my blood to seek newness and change as much as possible.
But learning to do like my friend is doing--to create newness--requires a lot of personal strength. It doesn't take much just to transfer to a new university or start hanging out with new groups of friends. It does take a lot, though, to make a whole new kind of music that people haven't done before. What's the difference? In the earlier case, the person is hunting down newness--he can't generate newness himself, and so he stagnates, unless he can move around a lot. In the latter case, the newness comes from within and must be let out to the world.
The two, I'm willing to bet, develop in tandem--the ability to seek newness and the ability to make newness--and that type of adventurous outlook can really make for some fun and exciting times.
I'm getting to the point in my life now where things are becoming so new and so fresh to me, continually, that I need to start releasing some of the energy those shocks to my system have given me. New frontiers take courage, and you have to keep yourself from worrying what people think about you. But the flip side of not worrying what people think about you is making sure you don't worry what you think about you--don't get too caught up in egotistical thoughts, whether they're thoughts of cockiness or insecurity; it's all the same.
Such a tricky game to play!
Joe Holmes is a student at George Mason University. Reach him at jholmes4@gmu.edu.
Date published: 5/8/2008
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