A new notebook is easy to buy and hard to open.
Not because of the paper, and not because there is nothing to say. It is the first page. Open the book and it sits there being important, and then the day goes by, and the notebook is still empty on the desk.
This comes up in journaling forums often enough that it is clearly not a personal quirk. The same question, in different words: what am I supposed to do with the first page?
The four things people do
Decorate it. A title, a border, a drawing, a quote. This works if you enjoy making it. It fails when it becomes a task standing between you and the notebook, which is how a first page ends up half-finished in pencil for three weeks.
Introduce it. Name, date, "this book belongs to", sometimes a stated intention for what the notebook is for. Useful if you keep old volumes and want to tell them apart later. Less useful as a promise, because the notebook rarely turns out to be about what you announced on page one.
Skip it. Leave it blank, start on the second page. Perfectly reasonable, and the option people feel worst about, because a blank page reads as waste.
Just start. Write the ordinary thing you were going to write anyway, on the first line, with no ceremony.
Why the page has this weight
Because it is the only page that gets read as a statement about the whole book.
Every other page is just a page. Page forty-three is whatever happened that day. But the first one seems to declare what kind of notebook this is going to be, and what kind of person keeps it. That is a lot to ask of a piece of paper you have owned for ten minutes.
The declaration is also imaginary. Nobody is going to read it. Even you will not read it — after about twenty pages the first page becomes invisible, the way the first page of any book you use becomes invisible. The weight is entirely at the start and disappears with use.
On wasting the page
The guilt about leaving it blank deserves a direct answer: a blank page costs nothing.
An unstarted notebook costs the whole notebook. If skipping the first page is what gets you to page two, that is not waste, that is the cheapest trade available. Paper is the least valuable thing in this equation.
If you want an actual suggestion
Put the date on the first line and write one sentence about the day you are having. Not about the notebook, not about your plans for it. About Tuesday.
It does two things. The book stops being new, which is most of the problem. And it sets the register: this is a notebook where ordinary things get written, not a monument that has to be maintained.
If that still feels like too much, turn to the second page and start there. The first page will still be blank in a year and you will not have thought about it once.
The real problem was never the page
It is the wish for a good beginning. That wish is why the notebook sits closed — and the only way past it is to have an ordinary beginning instead of a good one.
The first page is not the start of the notebook. It is the thing standing in front of the start.
The covers are here, for whichever notebook you end up opening.