The Blank Slate

The beautiful and most challenging thing about each post is that it begins with a blank page. Nothing but white and a blinking cursor prompting you to share your innermost thoughts and realities. It has no objective, holds no bias, and forms no opinion other than the one created by the writer who uses it.  It's simple, clean, and utterly daunting if you allow it to be.

Such is also every day. A day, regardless of how fantastic or nightmarish, is but 24 hours long. The sun creeps over the horizon, slowly glides towards its zenith, before descending and tucking back into the folds of darkness. All the events that occur within that span can be entirely independent or entwined with those that have preceded it in days, weeks, and months past. The entire basis of the consistency of our lives is but a continuous chain of these 24 hours of existences.

Your past? A sequence of days that have led up to your present moment. You have zero control now over the events of your past. You are no more chained to your past than you are to the sky. The future? Simply hasn't happened yet. The realm of possibilities is utterly endless. The only thing that your past and future have in common is that both are contained within the sands of time. 24 hours of experiences. The ones you have already have and the ones you will. It's as simple as that.

We humans tend to think of things as a narrow, linear path. The road from point A to point B and all the things that lie in-between. It's the writers, the artists, the philosophers, and the entrepreneurs who truly see just how malleable our lives really are. Mozart was competent with the keyboard and violin by age 5, whereas Stan Lee didn't release his first comic until he was almost 39. One of Edison's most famous quotes is "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work."; but a better quote by him was "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

On the flip side, nothing is as simple as we pretend it to be. The "straight and narrow" is hardly straight and not always narrow. It's full of unforeseen dead ends, u-turns, and blinking red traffic lights. You can have a bad day in the middle of a great month and a few dodgy months in a pretty average year. Circumstances are never as permanent as we pretend that they are. The sun rises, and it also sets. The air is still until the wind blows. Bad days and good days come with equal ease.

Whenever a difficult situation arises, there are but two ways you can face them: as a stone or as a river. Certain times, it is necessary to be the stone - unmoving and relentless. Push through and persevere. In the immortal words of Winston Churchill "If you're going through hell, keep going." Other times, it is pertinent to be the river. Flow around your obstacles and adapt. Move on and move forward. It's not always easy to discern which you should choose to be; and sometimes it takes both to make progress and begin the next stage of life.

This blog is my life. Each entry, like each day, begins with a clean slate. Some entries are done in a matter of moments while others take several days to write. And, as with every entry and every day, there is a beginning, middle, and an end. So make the most of the slivers of time that you have been granted. For there will be a day when the blank slate becomes the last one you'll ever have.