Something astoundingly unique about humans is that we can summon into being: an idea, a thought, a substance, or even another of our kind. We can—and do—conceive originality. I have found myself stumbling over that single point of beginning recently.

What makes something come forth from nothing? How do things originate? Do they emerge fully formed and armored like Athena from the head of Zeus? Do they warm backbenches until summoned? Do I have a latent supply of patience I don’t know about? A book waiting to be penned?

What makes something step forward from nothing?

Dancer and Emmy Award–winning choreographer Twyla Tharp once noted that her single point of beginning comes forth in emptiness. Every day, she seeks an empty white room, and every day, she arrives to create:

To some people, this empty room symbolizes something profound, mysterious, and terrifying: the task of starting with nothing and working your way toward creating something whole and beautiful, and satisfying. It’s not different for a writer rolling a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter (0or more likely firing up the blank screen on his computer), a painter confronting a virginal canvas, or a sculptor staring at a raw chunk of stone. Some people find this moment—the moment before creativity begins—so painful that they simply cannot deal with it. They get up and walk away.
From Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit

An empty white space to expand into, coupled with a belief or resolution that such expansion is possible (because it must be), constitutes the perfect condition for beginnings. Tharp has launched countless beginnings throughout her outstanding career, starting with empty rooms.   Of course Virginia Woolf famously argued for an empty room in order to write fiction, paving the way for thoughts of the same by both Dani Shapiro and Annie Dillard. However, I take it less literally than simply “an empty room” as Tharp advocates, and think it has more to do with concept of uninterrupted space, quiet, and endless runway of privacy.

Tharp continues:

The blank space can be humbling. But I’ve faced it my whole professional life. It’s my job. It’s also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.

Mark Strand, former U.S. Poet Laureate and one of my favorite contemporary poets (a reliable guide to nonexistence, fungible time, and the tensions of our inner and outer selves). Strand said although his development as a reader of poems was inseparable from being a poet, he remembered one unique point of beginning:

‘You, Andrew Marvell’ by Archibald MacLeish was the first poem about which I felt passionate, the first that I thought I understood, the first that I actually wished I had written. My own poems—the few that I wrote in my adolescence—were feverish attempts to put ‘my feelings’ on paper, and little more. Their importance, at least for me, their only reader, was exhausted by the time they were written. In those days, my life was one of constantly shifting weather, and the world within was rarely in sync with the world without. No wonder the linearity, the cool emotional order of ‘You, Andrew Marvell’ appealed to me.
From Mark Strand’s The Weather of Words

MacLeish’s poem named the feelings that held a young Strand hostage and, thus, brought his poetry into conscious existence—thoughts awaiting expression, which Strand, through a lifetime of writing, bestowed.

When we tap our subconscious, directly or indirectly, we jostle tiny, even insignificant, imprecise sparks we can seize, shape, and arrange. Perhaps our post-inception placing things into something precise is as essential as the beginning of those sparks themselves.

Using language remarkably similar to Strand’s, dramatist Harold Pinter discusses summoning characters into being and shaping them into use.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. […] Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word, or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. […] [A]s I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends. […] It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who, up to that point, have had no existence.
From Harold Pinter’s “Nobel Lecture” delivered in 2005
Listen to the full lecture here.

Whether filling space or summoning ideas to trigger additional ones, the more we know how things begin, the more we can prime their existence. Create time and place to engender thoughts and ideas, whether in a moment of rich mental ability sprung by a balance of work and play or triggered by silence and calm.

Isolating a single point of beginning is vital; it reminds us that we, all of us, can originate—the act of originating—what a power, what a wonderful gift. No matter how we do it, we create something original simply by living.

Leonard Cohen wrote in his poem “There Is a Moment”:

There is a moment in every day when I kneel before the love I have for you. Then I remember that I am still that man, and I know that my life’s work is to be that man […]. Once again the thought of you has rescued me from the puzzle of my indifference [..]
From Leonard Cohen’s poem “There is a Moment” in The Book of Longing

I like these lines, this point of the beginning.

And then there is Cohen’s use of the word “indifference.” Something to be saved from, something love saves him from. Indifference is the opposite of conception, the opposite of originating thinking. It is a cluttered space of nonprecious things, gone to decay and slipping into ruin, or worse, stasis.

Someone once asked me why I began to write. To conceive an original thought.   For a much more thorough and enlightened answer to “Why I Write” check out George Orwell’s essay of the same name where he explores his writing motivations:

“My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.”
A unique permutation of words, sure, but thoughts? Most have been long said. That is the point of The Examined Life: to collect and connect those similar points. To bind us unmistakably to everything that has preceded and everything existing.

And yet… originality. That single point of beginning. It happens. You do things all day, every day, that has never been done. You have never been done.

Seek a single point of beginning. Gather the small things and bring them to greatness. Bring things into being. Avoid indifference.