Even When You Can't See the Path Ahead
The white page glows under the reading lamp. My mind stalls, anxiously waiting to know exactly what to say, but every beginning feels like walking into fog.
Perhaps you’ve also felt this at certain times in your life, staring into the dark mists, uncertain what lies ahead.
You glimpse a trail’s ghostly curve, yet the horizon dissolves into haze, shifting with each step. It can appear as a barrier, but experience shows me this haze is the very weather of all new journeys.
Will I see it clearly?
No.
Will I begin anyway?
Yes, always.
Writing is a threshold: a doorway into fog, entered in silence, in the hush before the first word arrives. Each project pushes me across unseen borders, from known ground into wild, unmapped terrain.
Our culture tends to celebrate finished products—the polished book, the popular song, the completed journey. But for writers, the greater value lies in beginnings that emerge slowly, in the willingness to start before the way is clear.
This is potential waiting to be discovered, nourished, and grown into the beauty that mirrors life itself.
I recently found an old journal page of mine. A single phrase hastily scribbled on an otherwise empty page: "the weight of almost-words, almost being."
I wrote it in urgency, likely in another 3:10 AM insomnia. I have no memory of what moved me—only the urgency remains.
Looking back now, I can see the meaning, the relevance, and the purpose. It was as if I had unconsciously written a vision statement that I didn’t know I would later need.
Now, it is an underlying theme, drawing me into a fog I cannot yet see beyond. That phrase became the opening line of an essay I had never planned to write.
Until now.
To write is to befriend uncertainty. To sit with it long enough that the unnamed begins to stir and make itself known.
But many—most, perhaps—fear the sitting. Fear the waiting.
Why?
Empty spaces in life are like fog-laden valleys—I know their chill well. The blank page is a void, daring me to declare what I cannot yet see through the mist.
I'm tempted to wait for a clear map before I set out, to hold the whole story at once. But maps aren’t born in a flash—they are drawn, uncertain, into the fog.
No, they are sketched line by line—
Territory by territory—
Fragment by fragment—
Stone by stone.
In a way, beginnings are practical mysteries of the heart.
What feels like blindness is often discovery.
What feels like confusion—madness, even—is actually clarity.
Beginning—like crossing fog’s edge with an unfinished sentence or hesitant sketch—is the threshold to new language: a grammar waiting to emerge from the mist.
The most honest thing I can do is show up to the page not knowing—not expecting, trusting that the words will teach me what I need to say. What must be said. What the world must hear.
Even if that world holds only me.
Now I stand at a project's threshold, seeing only fragments through the mist. I sense its presence—even feel its weight—but the landscape is hidden.
The work resists my attempts to control it.
What the work asks of me is not mastery or clairvoyance, but a willingness to trust the process and step forward in uncertainty.
So I begin with fragments, with the discipline of showing up even when clarity does not come. I write in sketches, in partial maps, in gestures toward something larger than I can hold.
This is the quiet work of writing from The In-between. To honor the fog as part of the process rather than a failure of vision.
My success isn’t measured in applause or recognition. It’s not fame or fortune. It’s showing up to peer into the infinite, hoping to catch the smallest glimpse of cosmic truth—of pure wisdom.
No possession.
Only communion.
The courage to begin does not come from certainty. It comes from companionship. From knowing that others, too, are walking through their own fogs, crossing their own thresholds without a map or a guide.
My work is about creating presence, not answers. If even one companion joins me in this unknown, the writing is worthwhile.
To write this is, in part, to extend a hand—to say: you don't have to navigate the In-Between alone.
Come, take my hand.
Let us journey together—finding joy not only in what lies ahead, but in the ecstasy of sharing this path side by side.
For beginnings demand neither participation nor certainty. They ask only for the courage to cross a threshold whose name we don't yet know.
That is the quiet, unseen work of both writing and living: stepping forward, word by word, breath by breath, into that frightening, exciting, uncharted country of the unknown.
I know I am not alone in this. Somewhere, you too are standing at your own threshold, feeling that unique, peculiar mixture of terror and anticipation.
So I'll ask you: what threshold are you stepping into, even without a map to guide your way?
This is an invitation into the vast, uncharted thresholds of life’s unknown.
Come, let us begin again—stepping into the unknown, ready for discovery, and trusting in the courage we share.
Together.
— Dean Bowman
07 September 2025
Dean Bowman