“Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. 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. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.”
– C.S. Lewis
I recently finished reading Mere Christianity for the first time, and these words from the final chapter really stuck with me. It’s so easy these days to get caught up in feeling like we need to be doing more, earning more, posting more, spending more, etc. We get so distracted by the pursuits of this world that we lose touch with who we were created to be. We fill our lives with so much noise that there isn’t any room left to hear our true call. And yet we wonder why we can’t find passion in anything.
It can be exhausting looking for a new way to “be original” in a society filled with influencers, celebrities, YouTube stars, bloggers, and such. It can be overwhelming to think of how to stand out amongst all the other voices on the web.
And that’s precisely why I like this quote so much. Lewis reminds us that we don’t have to try to be original. We’ve already been created that way. We don’t have to worry about if we’re repeating what’s already been said and done a thousand times. If it’s something honest and worth sharing, then keep putting it out there.
Some terrific things have sparked from people simply pursuing and sharing what interested them. It often starts small and grows into something they never could have imagined.
So let’s drop the notion of being original and strive to live truthfully. That’s really all it takes, don’t you think?