Its many forms and purposes
I recently spent some time reflecting on the concept of novelty. The joy of new experiences, new places, new people. This joy is orthogonal; it can create new life paths out of nowhere, shift our perspective, and add outsized value to our human experience. I have spent much of my life in search of and discovering this brand of novelty.
While these experiences are beautiful, they are not everything. In fact, I am beginning to feel that it is the incremental joy of consistency, the little novelties that come from focused effort and energy, that are the most fulfilling. Going a level deeper with a friend, watching your loved ones evolve over time, evolving with them. Small, compounding novelty that adds to the depth of the human experience.
I am so grateful to live a life filled with both forms of novelty. Maybe it’s part of my (very slow) maturation process, but I now find myself orienting toward the low & slow approach and appreciating the depth of life’s little novelties more and more. The compounding joy of little things, the less exciting elements of building a life.
In fishing, this is appreciating learning more about your local water as much as or even more than traveling the world to catch new species in new destinations.
In skiing, this is enjoying one single hard-earned corn lap in your local backcountry as much as or even more than lap after lap of cat or heli-served powder.
In business, this is finding as much joy in the feeling of grinding it out as you do in moments of creative ideation.
In the arts, this is enjoying the mastery of a particular medium and subject matter as much as exploring new methods and forms.
Thank you, novelty. You’ve inspired my search for breadth, and I look forward to finding more of you in my journey as I orient towards depth.
