The Blank Page

So I’m struck and stuck with the infamous “writer’s block” once again, staring at an empty page, a blank void of white.  I don’t think I dare drink brewed coffee once again just to escape it and have words flowing strongly and quickly from mind to pencil to paper. Such a relief is only followed by my allergic reaction to coffee, resulting to a hideously swollen right eye. The price of good coffee…

But I suppose anyone can get inspiration from anything…even from something as dull as blank paper. The thing with a blank page is that it holds so many possibilities. Maybe that’s why we always have this hesitation when it comes to filling up a blank resume or a barren canvas. Writing, doodling, painting, or drawing something on something so blank and full of possibilities decreases the number of those possbilities. You draw a flower on bond paper and you cancel out the possibility of drawing a computer right next to it. You draw a piano and you cancel out the possibility of drawing a fish.

Or so it seems.

When one door closes, another one opens. You minus one possibility from your list of possibilities and sooner or later you’ll come up with ten more possibilities. The flower can be a desktop design for the computer; the fish can be placed on a fishbowl on top of the piano.

So what’s the lesson here?

Have no fear to do something new–to close one door–for another one will open. Learn how to turn one thing into another. Perhaps this is the “alchemy” of this century. You turn something as poor as metal into something as precious as gold. Turn an unused canvas into a work of art. Turn your unfilled notebook into a book of sagacious thoughts. Turn yourself into a better version of you.

Or maybe some of us can relate to that blank paper, waiting to be filled with something worth looking at and worth discovering. The teachers of this world–be it your parents or the world itself–are the pens that will stain you with what they are filled with. The ink is their knowledge, their experiences, and they try to fill you with these things too. Thing is, will you trust them enough to let them? DO you trust them enough to turn you into something worth finding?

This blank page ceases to be what it is with every letter I type into this contraption. Do not be afraid to cease to be. Changing yourself does not equate to your ceasing to be yourself. This computer too was once just something abstract–a thought in somebody’s head. But we humans have the capacity to transform the abstract into something concrete. That’s more than alchemy.