Pieces of paper

I have a babysitting job two days a week for a family. This last week when I was there, The 7 year old boy was working on a drawing he was going to enter for an art contest in school. Since we have been talking about kids, and creativity this week I started to ask him questions. I asked him at first what he was drawing. He replied that he didn't know, he was just going with it. I told him it looked really good. He told me thank you and than replied, "After all, if I don't like it afterwords, I have a whole stack of paper right here, I can just start over." 

That line has been running around in my head all week. "I have a whole stack of paper." He wasn't afraid of creativity. He wasn't afraid of messing up, or it looking dumb. 

Anyone that knows me knows I LOVE new notebooks. To prove this I even took a picture of all the journals I have bought...(most of these are within the last year) 

 Ive spent countless amounts of money on new journals, because they have a cool cover, or at the moment I'm inspired. I justify buying them because I'm going to write something great in them. The problem is, because I say I'm going to write something great, I end up not wanting to write until I think of something worth writing about. How many of these journals have I used? Zero. I just have a stack of empty pages. (But hey they have really cute covers!). This week were supposed to write about death. Ive decided I'm done. I'm going to kill the  blank pages. I'm done waiting for an amazing idea.

So I did. I took one of the blank journals, and I went outside 
(whose going to waste a good weather day like this?) I put in my headphones..turned on a One Republic song and started to write. I didn't wait for my muse to come along. I just started to write. Here's a picture of what I came up with.  

What I realized was that I didn't need to wait for inspiration. I went looking for inspiration. Once you start looking for it, its pretty easy to find. That One Republic song I listened to inspired me. The page turned out to be pretty good actually. Maybe I'll use it as my next blog post.  I think we should all start listening to that advice from the 7 year old I babysit. "There will always be more paper." So with that, I'm saying..death to empty notebooks. Death to sitting around waiting for inspiration. There will always be more paper if what you write isn't good. ( Tree huggers might argue with me on that.) Death to expectations of perfection in my writing. Death to being afraid of empty pages. Death to fear of failure. Afterall, There will always be more paper.