Nothing is a Thing

 

Recently, I toured an open house wherein the floor plan did not follow a traditional utilitarian layout. I noticed that many of us walking through the home found this oddly disconcerting, and, pondering with furrowed brows, we questioned what might become of the space, how it could best be put to “good use.” 

In short, our gut reaction was to solve how to “fill” the open areas.

And it struck me, this obsessive tendency to functionality, to make productive, to "waste not want not," to never have it occur to any of us to just leave it empty.

I realized that we do this with much of life.

We do it with weekends.

We do it with years.

We do it with children.

We do it with ourselves.

We try to figure out how to purposely fill   all    of    the    space. 

We forget, or perhaps never knew, that empty space is actually a thing. An entity to itself.

Empty walls. 

Empty weekends.

Empty prayers.

Emptiness is what often leads to completeness, to filling, on its own, what we have tried to force into being.

But only if we see it that way and grow comfortable with its initial, sometimes vulnerable, awkwardness. 

What we find is, that the empty, the nothing at all, possesses its own sufficiency. And over time, we welcome it as a coveted balancing friend. 

It isn’t meditation. 

Nor New Agism. 

It isn’t, you guessed it: anything. 

It is nothing. 

Nothing at all. 

And that is what makes it a thing. 

A quiet, often misunderstood, but essential, thing. 

We make room for it then, as we would for every other thing.

But when we make room for the nothing, there is going to be less room for the other somethings: the volunteering, recreating, schooling, socializing, media-consuming, television-watching, over-thinking and active distracting. 

These other highly prioritized fillings—these perpetual doings-of-something and stuffing of spaces—must now move over, or lose out to entirely, the exonerated empty. 

Nothing, realized and finally embraced as a concrete something, is unleashed to liberally supplant the void that always-doing-and-filling something naively created. 

Copyright Barb Harwood