A blank slate isn’t empty. It’s full of potential.
I forget this constantly. I plan to make something, the blank page just sits there staring at me, and the old reflex kicks in, the one that reads all those possibilities as pressure, as proof that I have nothing, know nothing, am nothing. For years I treated that emptiness as a problem to solve as fast as possible.
Today I see that the emptiness isn’t a problem. It’s everything that hasn’t happened yet, every direction still open, nothing certain, nothing ruled out. In other words, it’s just innocence. The state of not knowing. The state of the apprentice. The state of the child.
There’s a kind of person who lives like that on purpose. No big worries, moving forward without needing to know what’s around the next corner. From the outside it looks like naivety. It isn’t. It takes more courage to step into the unknown and greet it with joy than to stay home making a list of everything that could go wrong. You never really know what’s coming, and that’s not a threat. It’s the exact opposite. Anything can happen, and the opportunities are out there, scattered around, waiting for someone curious enough to go find them.