My head has been exploding with an unceasing barrage of thoughts I want to put into words that I haven’t been able to recently. There is no paucity of questions or concerns; yet, amidst the bombardment of thoughts, the pages are blank, the screen empty.
The word “empty” has manifested itself many times over. Physically, in my surroundings, the fast moving streetcars that race down the streets, no longer needing to stop for anyone. The coffee shops that bustled with energy just a week earlier, now fully occupied with chairs stacked on top of tables. Figuratively, in the spastic turbulation of the stock market, the plummage of economic ‘growth’. I haven’t thought about emptiness for a while, but this word kept resonating, why did it want my attention so badly?
I have struggled with emptiness in my life, it’s in those moments of emptiness that I have learned the most, the inchoate thoughts start to revive itself in a state of emptiness. Over the years, emptiness is a time for a restart, to open up my hands in an offering to embrace uncertainty and adventure. Maybe that’s why it keeps coming back — I fundamentally see a paradoxical relationship between fullness and emptiness. The fullness of stepping away from the murmurs of productivity and busyness, replaced with conversations of life and meaning (or with my roommate, the meaning of a governmental deficits and bailout money, fun stuff). The fullness of a day of reading and writing, soaking in the ideas of artists and thinkers I revere.
The empty calendar, and dearth of event invitations — a release and an invitation to be full again, to live without plans. The empty storefronts and institutions, a glaring sign of our dependencies and addictions.
Perhaps we can use emptiness as a tool to make whole again our lives, and those of the people around us. Perhaps in noticing the emptiness is an opportunity to change our definition of what it means to be full.
I read a quote that said: “Suffering has an ability to pull you into oneness.” Maybe that suffering also has the ability to pull us into fullness. Or a different version of it.
