Something New

 

“There’s nothing new under the sun.” was one of my father’s favorite phrases.  He was a sarcastic man and his ennui with life gave him a sour disposition.

To my mind there is something new in every moment.  It is true that patterns can repeat and sometimes people do things that are somewhat predictable.  But it is also true that no moment in time can ever be repeated exactly.

Since I became a committed student of technology there has never been a day when I felt like I had a handle on all that is available. Information is exchanged at an exponential rate and new developments happen daily. Rather than having any kind of big picture view I now have to search for and implement information on a “need to know” basis.

In my personal life also I feel like I am constantly recreating myself.  Our lives can quickly become limiting, even imprisoning if we do not frequently review and upgrade our thinking about ourselves and what we are doing in our lives.

My friend Kim says, “Envision it, and then take two steps backward and envision it bigger.” This overcomes a tendency to think small and stay comfortable. We can always grow and learn, although sometimes this can be scary.

This week I had reason to visit the “way back machine”, a site that archives nearly every old web page that has ever been since the beginning of the internet. I looked up my oldest website pages, my “Thoughts Create Reality” site started in 1998.  Sure enough my old pages were there.  There was a page of short essays that looked like a blog, but blogs didn’t exist yet. So much has come into being since those early days on the web.

I remember someone telling me about email before email became widely available. Back then it was something some universities had and she was using it to correspond with a friend in Italy. I didn’t think much about it at the time, little knowing that email would soon take over the world.

Who knew that seemingly frivolous things like Twitter and Facebook could unite people and  bring about political changes  like a successful people’s revolution?