2025 02 24

Streator, Illinois. November, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Lately, I’ve been pondering excessively about what to focus my energies towards. Fortunately, I think my self-imposed marching orders have more or less been made and I am now on a path, for the remainder of the year at least, to see where it takes me.

One deterrent to creating new work is the internal struggle towards judging the work you haven’t yet created! Will it be unique enough? Will it be original? Will it stand out in a world so saturated with content it’s quite impossible to even comprehend!? The quote below, while clearly written in a time prior to social media, Ai, and content factories, helped bring some sanity to my overworked brain:

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

-C.S. Lewis

-Clayton