Blank Page… Open Book

The best thing I've written this week was nothing at all

I sat down early this morning, laptop open, in my son Matthew's apartment, and did something I almost never do, I deleted what I'd written. Then I deleted what I wrote after that. And then I sat there, staring at a blank page, wondering what to do with it.

That got my attention. I've been writing my first book for years, and… it’s done, off to Amazon. False starts, redirects, the whole messy arc of it, and not once in all that time did I hit a wall I couldn't write through. So when I found myself scrapping page after page over the last two days, I didn't call it writer's block. I called it what it actually was.

A pause…

I'd flown out to Chicago to give myself a gift: five days with Matthew, to celebrate turning 69 together. And somewhere over those two blank mornings, an old idea came back to visit me. That we're each the authors of our own lives, and every day is a blank page we get to write. I've believed that for years. I just hadn't expected it to show up as the thing I most needed to hear from myself, sitting in his living room with the sun barely up.

Here's what I think happened. I'd just finished something that took a lifetime to finish. And the advice that comes after a big finish is always the same… don't stop, start the next thing. I had somewhere to be. I had a plan. Instead, I got two blank pages and a pause I didn't ask for.

I've come to think that pause was the gift.

Not because I figured out some grand plan for what's next. I didn't. But because in the space where I wasn't producing anything, I got to notice something simpler and better. Matthew and his sister Jennifer have told me, more than once, that I'm a good dad. I think I am too, and flying out here, I found myself actually sitting with why. It isn't the big trips, though we've had some good ones lately, Iceland especially, which Matthew planned down to the last detail and which gave us some of the best days we've shared as a family. It's the plainer thing underneath those trips: that showing up fully for the people I love, not managing them, not performing for them, just being there, open, listening, might be the best thing I have to offer. Not the book. Not the next project. The showing up.

There's a musical idea I keep coming back to, that the rest between the notes is doing as much work as the notes themselves. Silence isn't empty. It's where the sound gets its shape. I think our days work the same way. We fill them so fast, with plans, with the next thing, with the next page, that we rarely leave room for the pause that lets us actually hear where we are.

So this week, I'm not going to tell you what to do with your family, or how to show up, or what your next chapter should look like. I don't know your chapter. I barely know mine some mornings.

What I'll say instead is this… The next time you sit down to a blank page, literal or otherwise, and nothing comes, consider not forcing it. Consider that the pause itself might be the gift. Not a block. Not a failure to perform. Just a space of not knowing and not doing, where something quieter gets to open up.

Give yourself that pause…

Then close the laptop, put down the plan, and let the rest of your day be a blank page too, open to whoever's in front of you.

That's the best story any of us gets to write.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it… how about you…

be your best self now… - J.

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One day.
One decision.
One 16-hour gift at a time…

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