Blank Pieces of Paper

I’m sitting in my office.  Its 8:50 am on a beautiful Friday morning and I’m staring at a blank piece of paper.  This Friday is like most.  Not much changes from week to week.  I come to the campus I work at, eat breakfast, then sit and write my weekly blog.  Some weeks are easier than others.  This week, not so easy.

You have all experienced it.  You have to write a paper and you just can’t get started.  The clock is ticking toward the deadline and you have nothing.  It’s not like you haven’t been listening.  You’ve read all the material, done the research, but as you start to write, nothing is happening.  They call it writers block.  Call it what you want, but that doesn’t help with the problem as I continue to stare at a blank piece of paper.

If you ask someone who has experienced this before, most of them say the same thing.  The best way to get through it, to fill that big, white, blank space that you are staring at, is to simply start writing.  Start writing and see what happens.  But that isn’t working.

So I took a break from writing to get a cup of coffee.  The first thing I noticed was a couple of students lounging on the grass outside of my office.  One taking a nap the other working on a laptop.  I walked down the stairs, and saw students eating breakfast with their friends in the cafeteria.  We had guests on campus visits being given tours by our admissions ambassadors. 

I walked into Common Grounds, our campus coffee shop, and as happens often I found myself in a conversation with others standing in line, and met Thomas.  He had a Hillsdale shirt on, and I asked him if that was from Hillsdale, MI.  He said yes, and from there we had a moment.  I lived in Hillsdale when I was in 1^st-4^th grades.  That was way before his time, but we discovered that we both attended Bailey Elementary and consider ourselves “Hillsdale Hornets for life”!  Thanks for wearing that shirt Thomas. 

These experiences made me wonder if that’s the danger as I continue to stare at this blank piece of paper.  What could I be missing right now?  If I hadn’t gotten that cup of coffee when I did, Thomas wouldn’t have been in Common Grounds.  We wouldn’t have talked about Hillsdale, Bailey Elementary, and my experiences from a long time ago.  Because he was and I paid attention to the writing on his t-shirt, I have a new friend who shares a love for a place called Hillsdale.  And, this experience helped to fill up a blank piece of paper.

If you had a blank piece of paper sitting in front of you, what would you write?  You do, you know?  It’s what our lives are, blank pieces of paper.  We can choose to fill ours any way we want.  Some we plan, like Friday morning breakfast and an appointment with my desktop; while others  happen as we walk through our day, drinking coffee, reading t-shirts. 

It’s about the lives we choose to live and the ways we choose to live them.  So, what story will we write with our black piece of paper today?