Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course.
Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book
We have a wonderful cultural heritage that tells us that things that are old — things that have lasted — are the things that are good and should be preserved. To the ancient Greeks, gray hair meant “wisdom” because, after all, someone had to have accumulated wisdom in order to have survived long enough to get gray hair. And that makes sense. But if we dig just a little deeper, we see that the gray-hair of tradition isn’t always accumulated wisdom but is sometimes just the result of doing what we were taught to do for year after year. The longer we’ve done it, the more traditional it is. When enough time goes by, things tend to go gray: they gain a patina of age, if not respectability or reason. Lots of terrible things have been traditional at one time or another throughout human history, after all.
We are well into what many in Western culture consider “the holiday season” and it is full of traditions…it may well be the most wonderful traditional time of the year. But which of our individual/family/cultural traditions are the worn path of unthinking practice and which are worth keeping?
Consider that there’s a telegraph pole that stands in the left lane of a town road on the outskirts of Norwich, England. The telegraph is, itself, an echo from the past and it was argued that this pole was a symbol of that past and that we would be all the poorer for just removing it for our modern convenience. It had already survived for so long! And after all, the road was originally one lane, perfectly suited to horse-drawn carts. The pole was a reminder of that too! We must not lose our history! So the pole still stands and drivers must maneuver carefully around it which causes no end of near-misses and almost-accidents.
The key to differentiating between “accumulated wisdom worth preserving” and “tradition because it’s traditional” is to ask when following tradition renews us, recharges us, and helps us to reconnect with our past in a way that strengthens us for the future. There should be a reason for the tradition if we’re going to carry it forward…otherwise, we’re preserving a telegraph pole. And depending on our values and life situation, that telegraph pole of tradition might be standing in the middle of the road that we (and others) need to use.
