A Blank Page and a Distand Beating

An empty, blank page stares you in the face. What words will come upon it? What will the creativity of your mind posses your fingers to write upon that silvery white page? You sit in the late afternoon sun, staring out the window at the snow capped mountains. Will it be a journey-- climbing those mountains, that fills the page? Will it be a tragedy? Will it be a romantic love story? Or will it be a song that will be stuck in your head for weeks at a time? What is it about that blank page that causes your fingers to write? Why is it so thrilling to see the words suddenly appear on the blank page? Why does it feel like those words make your world go round?

You hear a distant beating, you wonder what it is. Perhaps it is the giant making his way down the beanstalk. Or is it the pounding of a buffalo stampede, coming at you as you sit alone on the prairie? Or perhaps it is the beating of young lovers’ hearts as they kiss for the very first time. Or maybe, just maybe, it is distant thunder that fills the sky. Promising rain for the desperate families so in need of water for their crops.

The beating stops.

What was it? Perhaps it was a rebellion and the last gunshot had been fired. Perhaps they had won their victory. But maybe they had failed and lay dying in their own blood, hopeless and alone.  Or it could feasibly be the timbermen felling a great oak tree. You were simply hearing the pounding of their ax. Perhaps the pounding had been the pounding of a thousand wild horses who simply stopped to rest before continuing onward. Or perhaps, just perhaps, Jack had defeated the scary old giant at last! Maybe it was the great god Zeus who had finally stopped throwing his huge lightning bolts for the day. Maybe it was Beethoven or some other great pianist pounding at his piano stopped to scribble down a masterpiece.

Your mind wanders with the endless possibilities of what the distant beating could have been. You try to decide which possibility belongs to your still silvery white blank piece of paper. Your mind comes back home when your mother calls you for dinner, and you realize that the distant beating was simply the beating of the contractors’ hammers building a house across the way. You smile because you now know why the beating stopped--they had gone home for their dinner. You put your paper and pencil down. You walk into the kitchen with a radiant smile on your face. You smile because you know you will never have a problem thinking of ideas for that silvery white blank piece of paper again. You simply have to listen to the distant beating.