There is something that is just so spectacular about the beginners mind…starting something fresh with nothing but potential in front of you. I love looking at Esmé in this way, as a trembling and hopeful collection of potential. She doesn’t speak…yet. She doesn’t walk…yet. All things are still becoming.
It is also one of the reasons I love to write. I love sitting here with a blank page in front of me and thinking about what I want to tell you…what part of my little world with Esmé I want to show you today. I enjoy imagining you, dear reader, reading the post and letting our worlds overlap for a few moments. Like a small bridge has opened up between us…and then, poof, back to our separate realities–hopefully, each of us changed just a bit.
Some posts I agonize over…typing and deleting, typing and rereading and editing–trying to find the just the right words to build a bridge to you. Other times I just write what I need to write…and later I wonder if you wrinkle your forehead and think “Oh Hillary, what?!”
But either way, I can always start again with another post tomorrow…there is always another blank page to fill, something more to tell you.
Today I’m going to let you in on a little secret, and I am going to tell you, because I know you will hold me accountable in finishing what I have started: For several months I have been working on a draft of a book. I had been cruising along, I thought, but then I started hesitating, realizing I had taken a wrong turn somewhere in there. It wasn’t coming together simply and naturally as it should. What I realized was that I was trying to recreate something from this space, recapture the immediacy of these little bridges between us. But this isn’t what the book wants to be about…this is this, and that is that…they are, each in their way, different views on the same scene.
So, as I have done so many times before with my academic writing, I tossed what I had (all 85 pages)…and I started yesterday with a blank page. All of a sudden I knew exactly where this story starts. I knew exactly the moment I wanted you to land in, standing next to me–the moment that tells you everything you need to know about how I started to become this sort of mother to Esmé. I know what comes next after that…and after that. Clear as day.
So quickly that bright white page wasn’t blank at all. I wasn’t afraid at all to let go of what I had before…it will inform what comes next. That is just how life goes.
Mostly I just felt free–and filled with potential.
Reader, this story is for you as well. I can’t wait for you to read it. Hopefully it will take you to some new places, but you’ll just have to wait a bit longer, it is still becoming…