Today I stared at a blank screen.

A motionless mouse and quiet keyboard filled my peripheries for hours.

Sentences half formed, paragraphs written through in rough part before being deleted.

Thoughts that jump from one place to the next, at times languishing in the paradoxical void of simply trying to think of "something to think of".

Now some of this stop-start stalling is undoubtedly due in part to the quantity of writing put out over the last year. As familiar areas are exhausted the demands of research and scope of the initial hunt for inspiration grows.

Some of this pause is also due to health issues that on occasion leave my mind fatigued and limbs heavy.

But mostly I just think these pauses are a necessary part of the process. Our brains need time to render the ideas we demand. Especially when we ask it for something new, when we ask it to connect known and unknown, to render the visual results of a software even as it writes the software's code.

Sometimes I'll spend weeks revisiting that void in amongst other tasks an projects. Knowing there's an idea there but unable to grasp it, catching glimpses of it in the negative space between other solid notions. Stealing what time there is amongst all the other thoughts and necessary actions to let my minds eye shift out of focus and find new forms in the voids.

This need to "render" is of course a problem in a world with 1.5 second attention spans. Caught up on demanding treadmills of content. The ability, opportunity, and the acceptance of the need to sit and think, seems to be increasingly difficult to come by.

We lament the loss of past masterpieces whilst holding no time for their current creation. We increase the demands on the ancillary acts of creation and some how wonder why the core work suffers.

Im not saying to sit around and wait for inspiration to strike, no, there are a multitude of articles and exercises on avoiding that pitfall. What I am saying is that you need time to process, to connect the pieces that make up those moments of inspiration, that become full ideas. We need space to think and to hold that space for others.

You need an empty page to fill it.