Almost Everything Has Been Said Before
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
-Andre Gide
Words Fall Between the Cracks
I Googled “Almost Everything Has Been Said Before” to find a quote of someone getting credit before my name could be attributed to it. In fact, the French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature the year my dad was born said something similar before me, just like the rest of us born too late to get credit for what we thought was an “original” thought. Of course, I have to find a reason to disagree and be more nuanced. I don’t agree with Gide’s absolute “EVERYTHING has been said before…” It just can’t be true. I don’t (usually) believe in all or nothings unless it’s too late or not enough. “EVERYTHING has been said before…” Really? This coming from a French speaker. The French have no translation for FUN and had a whole deliberation on what they were going to call the American “Walkman” because they don’t adopt or adapt foreign words. When I was in elementary school, I listened to my WALKMAN on the school bus everyday, not my “le baladeur”. Some things just get lost in translation.
You Are a Messenger, Act Like It
Also, the point of saying something is to reach others. Just because some random person said something before you, doesn’t mean your words or ideas are moot. You can and should say what you need to say because you are reaching someone else (maybe yourself). Even if the person you’re talking to has heard the exact words you’re saying before from someone else, it’s different coming from you. We are all messengers in and of a moment. Words hit different coming from different people before and after a moment. Say it, say it again, say it to someone else. Just give credit where credit’s due and don’t claim you’re the genius no one’s discovered yet.
The Power of Words
I love quotes because it reminds of all the people who I resonate with without even knowing they existed or said such words. I don’t get hung up on who said what and what I can dig up from their past to negate they had valid words at least once in their life. Some people will avoid using a Mahatma Gandhi quote because they’ll get hung up that he could be described by some people at some point in his life as a womanizer. Please. I also don’t need to know too much of the context before I utilize the quote for my understanding or communication. That’s the whole point of understanding that things are said in a moment that can never be duplicated. Words are just one way of expressing ourselves, they’re bound to used in a variety of circumstances.
Getting back to the point, I like to affirm an idea, it doesn’t have to be my idea. I mean, no ideas are OURS. Ideas have US. You think Elon Musk is the first and only person to want to normalize space travel and be rich and ingenuitive? NO, he’s just the only one to do it of HIS time and HIS magnitude. Other people may have had similar ideas, but they overthought and underachieved, or just weren’t prepared.
I say all this to explain why I like to use quotes in my podcast, Listen or Leave (available almost everywhere) and why you may see them a lot in my writing. Many quotes maybe familiar to you, so we can connect there, but my take is mine alone. If you haven’t heard the quote before, the quote will likely spark curiosity before I share s story you may have otherwise not been interested in. I want you to connect with me in a less biased place before I give you my personal take, YK.
I also love using quotes because it just reminds us of how cyclical life is. Things and ideas have a life of their own, they’ve been here before, and they’re not going anywhere. We’re the ones that are learning and thinking these thoughts are new just because we’re new to them. To Andre Gide’s point “…but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again”, I believe this is true because we can only listen to the best of our experiences. Not everything is going to ring “true”. I mean, who are WE supposed to be listening to anyway? There’s no way EVERYONE can agree or be on the same page so WE don’t feel like we’re repeating in some ways. I believe the only way we can stop from “beginning all over again” is to agree we never began, it will never end, nothing is new, and everything is new to us.
