New Year, New Course?

I'm getting off to a slow start again this year. Heading into my fourth full year of blogging (Lord willing), I find myself doing more than my usual amount of self-indulgent navel-gazing. It is a new year, and I'm still laboring under the presumption that this chronicle should be unto something.

A question has been haunting me these last few days, an unspoken query that I finally put into words just yesterday:

How can a man write when most of what he sees and knows in life is through what others have written?

Too many of my posts are born of someone else's idea, something else's effort. I read something online, feel compelled to comment, and there it is. What I contribute in those instances is nothing new and arguably meaningless - a chasing after the wind. What fruit will it bear to write about the same things you can read for yourself or watch on the news? It becomes a crutch, and stiffles what creativity there may be. For while it is not in me to write the songs that make the whole world sing (or the songs of love and special things), I still want my writing to amount to something.

In any case, I'll continue to write, because I must. But allow me to apologize in advance for whatever may come of it. I may have to engage in somewhat more lateral thinking in order to break free of this non-creative rut that has marked my writing of late.

A mentor of mine once suggested that it is possible to act yourself into a new way of thinking, and to think yourself into a new way of acting. Perhaps. I wonder if it might work with writing.

We'll find out, or we won't.