I found an unfinished song the other day. It must be at least twenty years old, maybe thirty. I finished it. What struck me wasn’t the song so much as the difference between the person who began it and the one who completed it. Back then I could become trapped inside an idea. I’d stare at its walls, convinced they defined the entire landscape. If I couldn’t find the right line, I might conclude there wasn’t one.

Now I can step outside, see the building containing the room, the city containing the building, the planet containing the city, and that planet floating among countless others. Somewhere in that widening perspective comes the realization that nobody really knows anything with certainty. All improvising. Oddly, that is liberating.

Writer’s block depends on believing there is one perfect way forward. But once you accept that every sentence is simply one possible path through an incomprehensibly large universe, the walls begin to disappear.