On discovery

More than two decades ago, I walked into a bar in Oaxaca, Mexico, ordered something I had never heard of, and had one of those conversations that quietly changes the shape of everything that follows.

The bartender was also the owner. We got talking — the way you do when you're somewhere unfamiliar and curiosity gets the better of you.

One conversation led to another, and by the end of the night he had invited me to join him at the market the following morning. Not as a tourist. As a guest.

We ate steaming hot lamb birria tacos at eight in the morning standing at a market stall, the smell of meat a nd freshly chopping cilantro lingering in the air. And it remains one of the more memorable meals I have ever had. Afterwards he took me to visit a couple of small distilleries making Mezcal in the hills outside the city — family operations, smoky and unhurried, producing something extraordinary in almost complete obscurity.

I had never tasted anything like it. Nuanced. Complex. Smoky in a way that felt earned rather than added. So far from the tequila I thought I understood that the two barely seemed related.

I brought a few bottles back to New York City, tried to describe what I had tasted to people, and nobody knew what I was talking about. Mezcal wasn't on any menu. It wasn't part of any conversation. It simply did not exist yet — at least not in the world I was moving through.

Something can be extraordinary long before the world is ready to recognise it. That's not the thing's failing. That's just how time works.

Then, many years later, something shifted. Slowly at first, then all at once. Mezcal appeared on a high-end cocktail list. Then another. Then a dive bar on the Lower East Side had three varieties. Everyone had an opinion about smoke levels and agave varietals and small-batch producers. The thing I had tasted in a Oaxacan hillside distillery at sunrise, the thing nobody wanted to hear about for years, was suddenly everywhere.

Nothing about the Mezcal had changed. It was just as good in the bar as it was on that hillside. The liquid in the bottle was the same liquid. The only thing that had changed was that people had finally caught up to it.

I think about that when I think about creative work. About how many extraordinary things exist in the world right now that nobody has caught up to yet. About how many photographers are making work of genuine power and originality and sitting with the quiet, corrosive question of whether any of it matters because the recognition hasn't come.

It does matter. It matters before anyone notices. The quality of the thing is not determined by the size of the audience for it.

The hardest part of making something real is the period between when you know it's good and when the world agrees with you. That gap can last years. It can feel like evidence that you are wrong about yourself. It isn't. It is just the lag between creation and recognition — and it is a lag that has always existed, for every worthwhile thing that was ever made.

Keep your vision. Keep putting the work out. The world catches up — it always does — and when it does, it catches up fast.

The owner of that bar in Oaxaca didn’t stop making Mezcal because New York City hadn't discovered it yet. The distillers in those hills did not change their process to chase a trend that hadn't arrived. They kept doing the thing they believed in, with the love and care it deserved, and waited for the world to find its way to them.

That is the only strategy that has ever worked for anything worth doing.

Make the work. Believe in it before you have permission to. Stay curious about what you don't yet know. And understand that being ahead of the conversation is not the same as being wrong about it.

The world will catch up.

It always does.

Simon Lewis

Founder

Humble Creative Society