Old and New

There’s never any single moment in life when you recognize that you have ‘grown up,’ that you are officially more experienced in the ways of the world than, say, 10 years ago. But every now and then something comes along which puts those ten years in perspective, and makes you realize that you, for better or worse, are more familiar with the show that life is putting on around you.

I had one of these moments not too long ago when I heard a song by Modest Mouse on the radio. While I may have heard some of their stuff before, it was the first time I actually knew what I was listening to, and definitely the first time that I remember a radio DJ talking about them and their work. Now, about 12 years ago I met a girl in college who is one of my best friends to this day, and this girl was a huge fan of Modest Mouse. I wasn’t into the music scene, but my friend would talk of going to Modest Mouse concerts at small venues on 'the hill,' the center of off-campus life. And this band which I had never heard of, and was well out of the mainstream, epitomized the newness of college life. That time in our lives where we meet lots of new people, try out new lifestyles, run into new ideas. Simply put, so much of our college experience, or mine at least, was characterized by a feeling of newness, of doing things for the first time.

Since then the pace of new things entering my life has slowed down to a bit more of a crawl. (Or, possibly, my excitement over new events in life has greatly diminished) In any case, I have graduated, gotten a job and been in the real world for a number of years now. Concurrently, that feeling of everything being new has certainly departed from my life. Modest Mouse coming on the radio was a vivid reminder for me of those old days when everything was new. Here was a band, who was now mainstream, which I could say ‘Yep, I’ve heard of them – my friend was into them since the beginning,’ and have a feeling of familiarity and maybe ‘oldness’ about the band. It was a strange feeling, because only 12 years ago the very same band was the epitome of the ‘newness’ of the world.

I certainly felt a little sentimental when I heard Modest Mouse on the radio, no doubt due to the juxtaposition of the ‘older’ self with the ‘newer’ self. Have I given up the excitement of the new for a sort of wise, less excited, ‘been-there-done-that’ older and experienced view of the world? And isn’t this the natural progression of things? I can’t say for sure, but it was, for just those few seconds as I reflected on the passing of time, a pretty powerful and somewhat nostalgic reminder of how things change. Or, more specifically, how our perspective on the world changes, but the things that populate it stay the same.