Reimagining Your Life Starts With a Blank Page
Thoughts on the interdependence and creativity needed to let ourselves dream a new future for ourselves and each other
Hello and welcome to The Art of Good Enough, a space of nature inspired art, gentle words and imperfect practice made to help us all build a more loving relationship with ourselves and the world around us.
We opened the Spring season with questions like:
How does conformity dissuade connection?
Where does Joy live in the every-day?
Where might aesthetic be replaced with authenticity?
How might your personal growth intertwine with communal growth?
As I introduce last week in the piece “Growth is Not an Aesthetic it is an Ecosystem”, Spring asks use to see growth as an inherently creative process and thus, also, an inherently interdependent process.
Today, I invite you to explore creativity with me, as it applies to both our individual and collective growth through the lens of The Blank Page.
Enjoy.
With love,
Kim
Reimagining Your Life Starts With a Blank Page
When I am creating something, sometimes the blank page stares back at me, cursor blinking, daring me to put a less than perfect idea down on paper
As if there are less than perfect ideas To put down on paper As if we don’t all start somewhere– That somewhere being right where I am And you are Here “Not yet,” we say. “Maybe tomorrow,” we employ. All the while narrating the experience, planning how to tackle whatever will come next What will come next? Do any of us know? Our capacity to welcome the blank page is where we dream of new beginnings.
***
Recently I listened to Conscious Citizen talk about a phenomena called hyper-normalization, which is where the end of something is imminent, the collapse real, but we all go about our business as if there’s nothing we can do about it.
According to anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, Hypernormalization is an acceptance of the gradual loss of order and the false belief in a clearly broken governing body or societal construct as well as the myths that uphold such acceptance.12
The opposite of hypernormalization is to be collapse aware. Collapse aware refers to living with the sense that something about the way we live is coming to an end. While collapse acknowledges what is coming to an end, the awareness of such an ending makes way for something different.
Rosie Spinks, who writes about Collapse in her essay “How I became collapse aware” goes on to say, ‘I’ve broadly come to think of collapse as the antidote to the narrative of infinite progress. The one we’re all steeped in, which tells us that with the right technology, innovation, and political party in power, we can save the way we’re living now. We won’t have to face what’s coming for us in a climate sense, and we don’t have to change anything fundamental about the way we live, what we strive for, and what we value. We can have it all.”3
If we cannot have it all, then what do we have? The blank page is an opportunity for us to do something with our hands and imagine a different future.
Most people are rightfully afraid of this reimagining. We want to revert back to what is easy and expressible, what has been done before. The blank page with its daunting nothingness invites pitfalls and evades perfection–the two things we are taught do not exist when we are creating something “good” or “worthwhile”. What about human?
This sentiment is echoed in @blackwoolncrown’s viral post: “Pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors. So now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do the way birds sing and bees make hives.’”4
Creating is human, not an aesthetic, not a social media post, not a fully fledged idea birthed from the womb. It is a baby. It is a process. It is an iterative dance between pen and paper, idea and inspiration. We don’t know what will exactly come of the words or the lines or the tune. That is part of the enjoyment. That is also part of the point.
The blank page is scary, because we have been taught to be scared of it. We’ve been taught that I alone must make something of this nothingness, but creativity is a reciprocal and interdependent process, which does not require you to have anything fully “figured out”. It only requires you to start.
***
There’s a book by Pete Reynolds called The Dot, where the protagonist can’t think of anything to draw and in a flush of anger stabs her paper to make a dot. The teacher, upon looking at this act of frustration, says to the girl, “Now sign it.” Through the acknowledgement of the imperfect and not very good dot, unfolds a book of iterative dots, and more complex dots and the capacity to offer those dots and the understanding gleaned from them to someone else.
On every blank page, whatever the “page” may be, we can start by making our own dot–not very good, maybe even awful–but then lean in with curiosity to what that dot could be. Just by starting, we have opened the doorway to threads, loosely connected, that have the capacity to weave an entire canvas:
that time you made deviled eggs with your grandmother that strange bug you saw on your walk the thing your best friend said to you three years ago a snippet of a podcast episode a quote from a Pete Renyold's book the past, the past, the past, as it grows and stretches and moves in and out of other experiences, creating something distinctly new.
Society is afraid. We see what we have known falling apart at the seams. We can choose to be aware of this collapse or normalize it.
The antithesis to hypernormalization is to dream. Therefore, we must stand by the blank page. Create like our lives depend on it, because in some ways they do. A society focused on consumption and capital wants us to forget that the blank page is part of who we are. We have the power to create a new reality however small and localized. However global. .
The blank page lives in the realm of dream, in the murky space between what is and could be. Through the process of creation, what could be becomes a definitive possibility, with edges, with a distinct shape, something we might be able to hold in our hands and gift to ourselves as much as each other.
The moment we put something, anything, on the blank page, and stop defining it with a given characteristic as good, or useful or enough, we have the beginning of a process that pulls us along as much as we, it.
When this happens, we just need to be willing to be pulled and see that pulling as not a means to an end but a process in and of itself: messy, iterative. Through this mess we find something inherent. Something human. We express something fundamental about ourselves and the world we want to live within. We get to define the future for ourselves And looks something like hope.
Journal Prompts
I would love to hear some responses to these prompts in the comments. :)
Where in my life could I dare to dream? What is the dream?
What is holding me back from starting? What am I afraid of?
What groups/ organizations might I become a part of (or already a part of) that are helping to create the world I want to live in?
Markets & Shop
Mayflower Market 5/10/25
Blooms on the Brook 5/14/25
Both of these are sponsored by Old Mill Coffee House in Chelmsford, MA.
Ray (@raytrospectively). Instagram post. January 23, 2025. instagram.com/p/DFLu4iVSHiU.
Harris, Brandon. 2016. “Adam Curtis's Essential Counterhistories.” The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/adam-curtiss-essential-counterhistories.
Spinks, Rosie. 2024. “How to become collapse aware.” Substack. https://substack.com/history/post/151545789.
(@blackwoolncrown). Tumblr. March 1, 2019. https://www.tumblr.com/questwithambition/636193706588995584/goldhornsandblackwool-pretty-shitty-how.