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The sun grows the tree of history; it knows the roots, the fruits, and the flowers.

The earth rotates around the sun at 1038 miles an hour, 24,912 miles a day, a total of 584 million miles—one full rotation—in a year. 

In that time, the sun’s light seeps into the darkest, most barren of places: from the north to the south pole, from the Sahara Desert to the Island of Tonga, to where I’m sitting at this moment. The sun has seen everything. He has watched me grow up.

He has observed me finding a passion for writing, music, and theater. He saw as I took my first steps into room 139 last year, unbeknownst to how that class and that teacher would change my life. Most importantly, he chuckled as I wrote my very first column, a cliché, carbon-copy rewrite of an example presented to us in the intro class. The sun had watched the creation of said example, a column that that writer created.

Nothing is new under the sun.

I see this unfortunate, bittersweet fact in all facets of life—writing, film, even music. Music is not random; there are only 2401 chord progressions that a musician can play to make his work sound coherent, to make it musical. This number is minuscule to the estimated number of 97 to 230 million songs on this earth. 

I want my work to be a village of sprawling, detailed estates, all distinctively different but still recognizable as mine. Not a copy-and-paste condo village where every house is an exact replica painted in different hues of green.

I don’t want to dig through someone else’s dirty laundry to find something salvageable to alter and rehabilitate into something “new.” I don’t want to thrift creativity, artistry, and innovation. I want to embody creativity. I want to be an innovator.

But refurbishing and renewing is what must be done. One cannot create an entirely new chord progression, for it will sound amiss and out of place. I am tired of seeing the monotonous roll of outdated cards I’ve been dealt; I am tired of playing these cards. 

But it is impossible to change the game. 

As I place the pen on the page, my mind wanders to the brief, poetic phrases I have written in my notes app—phrases I have included in this very column. Phrases likely thought of before, maybe. My notes app isn’t genuinely poetic. It’s someone else’s words, after all.

But what is creativity if not a rework of something known into something relatively unknown? What is philosophy if not a patchwork of past ideas sewn together with the golden thread of prolonged reflection? What is language but a string of sounds, vowels, and consonants, strung together by agreed-upon definitions and meanings? 

The words on this page are simply letters united and given meaning by our fathers. These words, the sun recognizes, but their organization and composition, he does not.