The Blank Page

The blank page is a love letter to humanity. It symbolizes our demise and our rebirth. It speaks to our infinite potential and endless reincarnations. It includes love at its purest and brutality at its most violent.

In our attempt to solidify life and find meaning, we speak in absolute terms as if life is absolute. As if life is a fixed entity that responds in a predictable and computable manner. But life is organic, constantly in flow, always evolving, learning, transforming, adapting, emerging and reinventing.

Our attempts to capture it into a box are futile. Our experiments to find the definitive way forward ill informed. The endless seeking never satiated.

Why?

Because we’ve missed the point. We’re looking in the wrong direction.

We search for absolutes, for fixed variables, for universal laws outside ourselves that will guide us. And so we create frameworks, strategies and tactics to will ourselves into a successful life. We decide to do the work on the parts we don’t like and process the things we struggle with, as if this were the answer.

But somehow despite all our efforts, we remain in the very place we started.

We cringe at the thoughts we believe hold us back, we look away at the parts we wish weren’t there, and we hide what we don’t want others to see, not realizing that in the seeing lies the path to freedom.

Seeing that we are the blank page. We are pure potential. Hope. We are shadow and light. And without both, we would seize to exist.

We fail to see that dark invites light.

We fail to see that efforting opposes progress.

We fail to see that absolutes rob us of potential.

Even when we learn to look inward we don’t recognize the bigger point.

We look at answers rather than the innate capacity to produce them.

We look to content rather than awe at the inner mechanism that delivers it.

We look to change rather than admire what is always already constant.

We use the blank page to construct a sense of ourselves with a name, personality, a past and future and fail to see that we are that which constructs the image, not the image itself.

We are not fixed. We are not absolute. We are not constrained by our past or victims to our circumstance. We are the blank page, on top of which the stories of our lives is written moment by moment.

And this is worth knowing, because it simplifies life. It eliminates the noise.

What is left is the blank page. And with it, hope.