DRAWING A BLANK
DRAWING A BLANK
I know every writer can relate to this; you are sitting in front of your computer or notebook with pencil in hand (depending on how you like to write) and your mind suddenly has nothing to say, therefore your fingers twiddle. Barren, dry, nothing, blank. When this happens, as it does on occasion, I panic. I panic because I wonder if I will ever be able to write anything meaningful again, I panic because I wonder if I have become like the blank computer screen, unable to do what I feel I am called to do. I panic because my internal conversations, which hardly stop, suddenly cease and I feel like I have become an empty barrel, good for garbage and nothing else.
Recently, I have been going through such a dry spell; thousands of ideas for thought provoking discourse yet no words, nothing, nada, dry, barren, blank. Like a virus, it takes its own sweet time to go and then the internal conversations start up again. But this time I realized something about my dry spells; they are caused by certain conditions that usually happen around me, most times not necessarily to me. Looking up the meaning of the phrase, ‘drawing a blank’, which I have used as an excuse not to be able to get things done, I found a rich history, hardly surprising. I am always amazed at what I find when I dig a little. The phrase, ‘drawing a blank’ means two things, oddly enough. First it means to fail to recall a memory and secondly, it means to fail in some speculative effort. Fair enough, I thought. But definitions don’t satisfy me so I dig a little more. What is its origin? Who said it first? What kind of metaphorical meanings can I draw from this phrase? For a phrase that I use, I found out that I didn’t really know that much about it.
The phrase originated from a lottery that was established in Tudor England. The Tudor period, is regarded as between 1485-1603, and spans the reign of the House of Tudor in England and Wales, whose first Monarch was Henry VII and ends with Elizabeth II. At this time, England was broke, poorer that many other European realms. The idea was mooted to start a lottery to help finance projects that would protect the Throne and regenerate the Kingdom, strengthen it from its rivals all around it. The money so raised would also go towards modernizing the infrastructure. Elizabeth bought the idea and signed into law a license granting the setting up of a National Lottery in 1567. Just like today, people would by tickets, they would go into a ‘lot pot’ from which winners would be randomly drawn to win prizes, drawn from a second pot or what I call a prize pot. The problem is that the prizes were not in the same number as the tickets, so not all ticket holders win something, some tickets drew ‘blanks’ from the prize pot…nothing. By the 18th century, the phrase began to be used in hunting circles and by the 19th century, it started being used in a general figurative sense to mean to be unsuccessful in a venture of any kind.
Sometimes I think life is a bit like a lottery; we start as a sperm in one body and an egg in another. Two people, male and female, donate either and nine months later we pop out into the world, one in a million chance of one particularly strong and able swimmer, aggressive enough to find and conquer the egg first. Then nine (or so) months of fighting for survival, then only God knows how many hours of struggle to exit the confinement of a mother’s womb. Then God knows how many seconds, days, weeks, months, years, decades or century+ of the vagaries of what we call our life. Along the way, disease and sickness is forever hanging around in the background, constantly attacking us. Also, potential accidents are waiting to pounce on us and potential violence is waiting to catch us. In the midst of all this, one has to fulfill the purpose for which one won the lottery to be born, never mind into what circumstances one came or where one finds oneself. You play the game of your life with the cards you have been dealt, like it or not. Yeah, I think it is a bit of a lottery…but only sometimes. I also believe that The Creator knew me before I came to be and planned the whole episode of what I know to be my life.
This tells me something; it is important not to ‘draw a blank’ in the game of life. After winning against ridiculous odds to be the one out of millions of sperm to fertilize an egg and survive the ridiculous odds of all the different enemies out there, whose only aim is to cut short your life, if you do not use that life to win from the prize pot, but keep drawing blanks, then one leaves behind nothing. Today, there are many prizes we can win from the prize pot of life, we can win at being a great father/mother, wife/husband, sister/brother, niece/nephew, child/friend, doctor/nurse/engineer/whatever other occupation. We can win at being kind, caring, forgiving, pleasant, helpful, diligent, honest and so on. We can win at living with integrity; we can win at being the best version of oneself. We can even win at trying again when we fail. We must never give up; we must never draw a blank with our life.