Most of our core memories are influenced by tradition.
Whether it’s celebrating a birthday, graduation or another life milestone, our culture signals to us the moments that are of significance.
The events that are both individual to our circumstance as well as shared across our communities.
While many of us might come to disdain the repetitive nature of these "milestone moments," it’s difficult to deny their value.
Benefit in what sense? We are cued to give particular significance to moments that might otherwise pass under the radar. The concept of achievement is abstractedly determined. It is our choice to value and make these traditions significant, opting into the cycle, complying and willingly sacrifice aspects of our autonomy.
Because why wouldn't we choose to opt into tradition?
To opt out is its own protest.
All to say, going against the grain of tradition has always been the birth of something new.
Something different, that stands to become something refreshing enough that it becomes its own tradition.
These rebellious acts of creativity shift and change the tide.
Change never occurs in isolation, but from the premise of tradition.
In choosing to chart our own path in how these rites of passages translate, we create variation by deviating from the common foundation.
It is history that informs the new.
It is in understanding what has taken place, where we’ll fix our anchor to outline the change of direction and the change in tradition.
They say those who do not know their history are bound to repeat it, and they are correct. A new idea lacks the depth of ingenuity if it’s not taken into consideration the context of the past. A new idea lacks depth and complexity without first having an understanding of the history. Innovations that last are the byproduct of traditions deeply understood, and subsequently thoroughly unwoven.
Difference requires tradition as its point of reference.
Life events that we celebrated in the past, play a role in the life events that we celebrate - and collectively have chosen to denounce, in the present.
Growth first requires the discomfort of present day constraints.
Pushing beyond the limits requires an awareness and an acknowledgement of the limits that were in place and the effects that those limits carried in their widespread popularity.
The history was always the most important factor for truly profound, and catalytic change.
So in every case where we are positioned to create anew, it’s always a tribute and in remembrance of the old.
The marks in history that should never be forgotten.