The Tensions Between Old and New

We often complain about the old and dismiss what has been.

Every generation chases the horizon and forgets that they stand on the very ground that has been nurtured and paved by the people who came before them.

Every generation is convinced they have all the answers to century-old problems. But we fail to remember that soon our very own ideas and understanding of the world will be the one labeled ignorant and backwards.

I am currently reading the book Lessons from History, and this quote stuck out to me:

"The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it—perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole."

My heart belongs to the future and to all possibilities not yet materialized. I too am eager to make this world a little better before I leave.

And for all the resistance, obstacles and hardship in our ways, somehow it is calming for me to know that the tension between the old and the new is the very process to achieve just that.