I am pretty sure that I am remembering this correctly. It was a dozen years ago, it seems, that I heard an interview with Billy Joel and he said something along the lines that when he was young, he thought he had a lot of important things to say, but he realized as he got older that other people had said those things before.  I imagine that for many I am the cold shower that Joel experienced when he faced said reality.

Many times, someone will post a great idea in LinkedIn (I don’t “do” Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and I will comment with a quote from someone else that affirms the poster’s message or I will link to a book written decades or centuries before. I suspect that the person who posted what they thought was a brilliant, original thought might be a bit bummed that indeed someone else said something similar before, and that person might have a Greek name or a biblical name or a Roman name or a Russian name or … No offense to all involved, but typically the one who said it before did so with greater depth and articulateness, likely because they weren’t trying to produce social media posts or bumper sticker philosophies. They were truly philosophical, i.e., lovers of knowledge and wisdom.

Even those that I refer to follow the ideas of others. As the saying goes – speaking of biblical wisdom – there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Reading beyond one’s own writings of “original” ideas, or social media posts, or motivational memes requires a dose of humility and/or doing so instills humility when realization sets in that there have been a lot of really smart people with great ideas over the course of humanity’s history. Our own messages are but faint echoes of those from the near or distant past.

It takes some humility and a bit of grace to delve into the thoughts and writings of those who came before us to learn of their wisdom, knowledge and thoughts thereof. By researching, we are not discarding our own ideas but are actually feeding them for greater growth and development. The fruits of the intellectual harvest will be great when we realize that our thoughts are not seeds that have to start growth anew but are actually grafted onto the collective wisdom of humanity.

I think that the educational system of the past several decades (or more), and the flawed self-education processes born by the internet, have a lot to do with the shallow roots of much thought nowadays. Ironically, the internet can be both the blame and the solution to the challenge of historical perspective to thought and philosophy, but I’ll leave that discussion to a few hours and bourbon or few, though.

Whatever ideas we have are the outgrowth of experiences we’ve had, things we learned, knowledge we’ve been exposed to, the history we’ve lived through and so on; likewise, all those were built on those who came before. It takes humility to delve into the volumes of output because we realize that however “brilliant” or insightful our ideas are, they are ultimately not totally original. And that’s okay. We should not be discouraged, but we can take heart that the burden of originality is not ours to carry. Read, learn from the past (near or distant or ancient), be open to having our own ideas illuminated by others. Ever deepening wisdom will be the result.