Photo by GAV Fotografia

That’s always how it starts, with a blank page or screen or space to fill.

Sometimes the empty page feels safer and more secure than the one that starts to fill up with words and, ultimately, pieces of ourselves.

It’s said that work will expand to fill the time allotted for it. Who sets the parameters for self-discovery, self-revealing, and what is the time allotted? Where are the lines? Where are the margins? Truth is, no one knows when the time will run out.

The purity of the blank page is an illusion, it’s true, but we all have our illusory safety nets that feel like our reality but are in fact a parallel and virtual reality that, if we become too comfortable with them, if we travel too far down the road with them, we find there is no bridge to the other path, to the real, not without going all the way back to a much earlier point where one road split in two.

Why, on a blank page, is the starting point at the top? Because it is.

There are no shortcuts.

That’s not an easy pill to swallow so far down the virtual path while looking across the divide at the inviting, but scary, path of the real.

When the virtual feels like your reality, it becomes it. If perception is reality, and I perceive the blank page to be pure and unspoiled, then in fact I just spoiled it.

These smudges now exist where there once was only white.

All it took was moving my fingers. I did not move my feet. They would have far to travel if they were to go all the way back down this path, to the beginning.

Today they look at the divide and its imposing, challenging breadth. It looks so close, and yet so far away, and besides, my feet hurt.