Nothingness

Hi there,

Note: I missed my schedule this morning and am sending this without editing it.

Just before I sat down to write this, I spent about twenty minutes doing a breathing exercise and meditating. I wanted to get to the place I mentioned in my PS last time, this place of “nothingness” or “no-thought.”

I’m not sure how good I am at that kind of thing. How would I even know? Does it have to do with comparison? By which I mean it doesn’t seem likely to matter much if I’m better or worse at it than someone else. Come to think of it, I’m not sure it even matters if I’m good or bad at it at all.

What’s the point of all this living? We can—and do—make up stories all day long about what it means and what we’re doing and why it matters. But really, what’s the point? Everywhere I look, everything is just moving and growing and spinning and glowing around. The whole of everything is in a constant dance with itself, for no apparent reason other than that it can be. I almost wrote there, “…because it feels good.” But it doesn’t always feel good, does it?

I kind of pre-empted myself there, because where I was headed when I started that last paragraph was to say something like the point of all this living is to feel good. And maybe there’s something to that, evolutionarily speaking. Feeling good probably tends to mean we’re on something close to the right track in regards to what’s going to keep us moving and growing and spinning and glowing and all that. But sometimes it all just hurts, doesn’t it? Being alive and having your heart broken, watching as things fall apart (sometimes they move in that way, too, despite our best efforts to the contrary). Plenty of people have left their human existence via methods that seem orders of magnitude more painful than anything I’ve ever experienced.

So what is it that keeps us—and everything—going? What’s the point?

The only thing I can think is that the question is unanswerable. That any answer is going to be so far away from whatever a “whole and complete” answer to the question would be that it makes the question itself seem nonsensical. Like I wrote last time, I’m not any kind of unified thing, I’m just whatever version of this person/spirit/thing that shows up right here, right now.

But maybe there’s a kind of answer to the question in that. Maybe the point is whatever it feels to me like the point is right now. Thinking back, I guess I never experienced it as being otherwise. I was often told growing up that there was a big, cosmic, always-true point to things, but when I search my memory the examples I can find of times I felt most connected to what I would call a purpose had to do with small moments and narrowly-defined goals: a performance, a trip, a meal, a song, a poem. Maybe all the things like that in my life were the points. Not THE point. Just the point back when they were happening. When they were the thing.

If I apply that to right now, maybe the point is this email I’m writing you. Even this sentence. Maybe the point is how you feel in this moment.

Into the calm stillness I feel having written that begins to echo a voice that says, “but wait! Isn’t there power in sustained effort?” So I guess there’s someone back there in the darkness lending their voice to this idea. I’m not sure who it is, but it seems like they, too, must have a point. At least they do if power is what I’m looking for. I don’t think it is, really, unless it comes as a side-effect of the thing I actually am looking for. In which case, great! But greater still will be having gotten the thing I’m looking for. Whatever it is.

You know what, I think it’s probably myself. Sitting here, watching the birds eating berries off the tree outside my window, I find myself wondering, “where am I in that?” Another voice rises out of the stillness: “nowhere, and everywhere.” For now, that will have to be enough.