Abhorrent Emptiness

There’s a strange habit that we’ve all been carrying around with us all along in our lives. It’s ingrained in our minds right from our births, and we embrace it to our hearts as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. Maybe it is, I’ll let you be the judge of that. So here’s the thought. We can’t handle anything in its fundamental, natural, and elemental form. It’s as if everything just leaps at us, screams and claws onto our restful minds to defile, deface, break them in as many ways as possible.

We as humans simply can’t seem to handle emptiness. We can’t handle blank walls. It needs some holes in it, then it needs to be plugged with nails of metal, and then there are pictures that need to be hung from those nails. What is worse, we even do it in the name of minimalism. Centering a less than ideally sized picture of a lonesome flower on a wall of exactly the opposite colour, and we call it the minimalist’s dream, the perfect contrast! Nietzsche would have been proud. Or maybe he would stir in his grave for this gross misinterpretation of his thoughts. I don’t really know. I haven’t read enough of his ideas to know which is which. Enlighten me in the comments if you know!

Everything, it appears in our minds, needs filling up, doesn't it? Sheets of paper, natural structures resembling shelves of wood and stone. Strange contraptions made of metal we call boxes. They keep mounting around and on top of each other like some matryoshka dolls. And of course, how can we forget the infinitesimally small squares of sand they call transistors in our phones and computers, so called the never ending soft memory.

Just what is it about emptiness that scares and shakes us to our very core?

Yes, that was the original question behind this train of thoughts. A question that just so happens to be a perfect amalgamation of ridiculousness — provoking a sense of complete incomprehension, repulsion even — and a foreign sort of curiosity — a kind of ‘why’ like no other. I don’t know about you, but it does polarise me immensely. You don’t follow me, do you? Let’s play a game.

Think of a scenario for me, would you? Consider for a minute that you are an astronomer. What, given this situation, is your worst nightmare? Here’s an option: Are we alone in this incalculably gigantic universe? There might be other candidates, but for the majority, this one takes the cake, doesn’t it? And yet, the answer to that little question is just as uncertain as the true size of the universe itself. It’s as plausible for it to be true as the idea that we’re nothing more than stardust in the grand scheme of things. And it has the potential to be as false as the assumption that two legs are better than none. So, what do you do in those shoes? You go about probing the spinning rocks zipping through space at nerve wracking speeds. You keep reading the colourful charts, trying to uncover the hidden truths that you can’t even be sure exist there. And when you’re completely tired from all of that, you go back to the drawing board and sketch out far fetched plans to fill up that void. You talk of colonising mars, then look beyond to alpha centauri, and even farther to the Andromeda. You zoom out to the very edge of the box of your understanding and then imagine a bigger box. And in the case of the multiverse, you simply imagine an infinite number of them. Emptiness, is the greatest of our fears.

Am I deviating? Yes, no, maybe, choose your pick. What I am trying to say is, shouldn’t we just try to relax a bit. Shouldn’t we just move from the question of ‘what happens if I fill up this little box here with something?’ to ‘should I fill up this little box here with something and would that solve a purpose for me?’ And yes, believe me, I realise that coming from someone who is literally spending an hour here stringing words together, that notion sounds like blasphemous hypocrisy. It is simply the age-old proposed transition of thought from what-if to should-I.

But if you think about it, and I really hope you do, isn’t it even a slight bit desirable as perhaps the most proliferating species on the planet to sit back, relax a little and look out at the bigger picture. Okay, maybe species as a whole is too much to expect, what about as an individual? Is that too out of character as well? Is that too deviant as well, to just simply let things be, to let things take their natural course? Let’s try that for a couple weeks, shall we?