A blank sheet of paper is not intimidating. It’s comforting. It is silence.
That is, if you come to that blank page, not to achieve something, not to produce something, but simply to receive with gentle curiosity whatever that blank page may have to say to you. Then it holds you softly in it’s embrace and you can be with for a while, as you would be with your love for a quiet moment, with your head on his chest.
Then, as ripples form on the surface of a still lake, the ripples in your heart will create undulations on the page through the movement of your pen. Soon, the blank paper remains blank no more. It receives some of your cluelessness. In its receiving, some of its silence penetrates and permeates your heart.
If nature is in the vicinity you can go and simply look at nature ― a tree, a water body, the sky, a path that leads to the horizon — and that looking is a date with silence, a date with yourself. It, silence, may steal upon you and gently hold you its embrace even on a crowded railway platform, or the living room of your home, even with the television on, but silence has to work a little harder then. It has to jostle through the transactions of the transactional world to reach you — and silence does not really believe in working, let alone working hard.
A blank sheet of paper can also take you on a date with silence, a date with yourself. For all you know, soon you might find yourself cruising on a carpet of words, through a wordless universe.
Words are beautiful because they hold the wordless within them. The first step of learning a language may be to learn the meaning of its words, but the true meaning of words lie in the wordless. When we can hear the wordless in what has been said, that listening, that comprehension is rich in taste, like wine.
He/she may have said something over a span of seconds, but you have as much time as you may need to listen to and comprehend what he/she said. You can take years for the listening to occur, of what was said over seconds — and that is perfectly fine — for when that listening occurs, everything melts away. What remains is the timeless, the wordless.
What remains is the only thing that is ever being said, through every word of every language. It is what every word means.
Not that dates matter, but I discovered this piece on my phone a few days back. It written was in Jan 2023! That I happened to discover it now was an additional gift and connection to silence. Thank you! (to the powers that be 🙂 )