style="font-size:15px;"> But who makes you consume these things? You’re still there with your own soul and your desperation; you’re the one who is missing something, and knowing what is missing could be useful.
Laozi:
Wishes bring evil.
Unrest brings trouble.
Wanting brings misery.
Knowing what’s enough,
Then that’s enough.
Mind the gap
Anyone who has travelled on the London Underground will remember the message repeated from all the loudspeakers on the arrival of a train: ‘Mind the gap’.
‘Notice the space’ between the train and the platform you’re stepping on to, that’s all. Just a friendly warning, and actually rather over the top because the gap is not very big; you get over it easily, so you don’t notice.
But such a warning, especially over a loudspeaker and heard multiple times, remains in the memory as if it was something important. And if you’ve heard this day by day, year on year, maybe thousands of times in exactly the same manner, it will be especially well remembered.
It’s no wonder that this phrase is on T-shirts in the souvenir stores in London, in the titles of albums, films, novels, registered companies, and has been used in lyrics, video games, and so on.
The gap is, in fact, both a ‘gap’ and ‘space’, emptiness, something that isn’t. And you have a recalling or reminder of this non-existence. Notice the emptiness, notice what isn’t. It’s pretty deep, isn’t it? And not only in the sense that you can step down there accidentally and get hurt. Inevitably, there’s more.
What creates music? Sounds? Oh no, the most meaningful parts of music are pauses, silence. As voices become silent, the instruments don’t make a sound, the expectation builds…, the tension… If you don’t understand it before, at least at the end of the performance, when every sound that was supposed to be sounded has been heard, the moment before the applause… it’s the most powerful, the most important moment.
It’s all been said, there’s nothing left. ‘Emptiness’, isn’t it?
Only then, in this mysterious silence, do you know what it was all about and what everything meant.
Or in art: no miscellaneous objects, whether they three- or two-dimensional, coloured or moving, are important. Well, of course they are, but they are there to give meaning to what is between them, to what is not: the shadows, space, air and emptiness.
Nor in architecture is the meaning in the buildings, houses, walls. Oh no, rather what is between these walls and what is going to happen in these spaces? How it will be to live, work, spend time there, just to be? How will they look, how will you go into them, pass through them? The meaning is in all that is not: rooms, emptiness, hollows and gaps.
Laozi:
Spokes keep the wheel together.
But the hole in the centre
makes it useful.
A vessel is formed from clay.
But the hollow within it
makes it useful.
Or, for example, there is a meeting, council, conference, sitting, presentation. Somebody talks, someone takes notes, and there are settlements, an agenda, moderator, manager, a tight timetable full of events, saturated data, information…
But then there will be a break. And then, during this break time, if nothing formal or matter-of-fact is happening, just at that time, if no one has to do anything any longer, to speak, talk, perform – just then, the most important events happen.
People interact with each other, comment on situations, make jokes, exchange thoughts, realise, understand, reach conclusions and conclude agreements and ties. The room is open, empty and it inspires.
Notice the emptiness.
Mind the gap.
What’s important is what isn’t.
A very good mind-development practice or meditation is to look at the emptiness, focus on emptiness, wherever we are. We see only what we are looking at, and we look at what has some significance for us, which offers interest. But we can also look in a different way and see other things.
For example, some bushes, a forest, a passage of leaves, branches, stems, where there is nothing interesting. But you can look and discover all that’s between them. This empty space, where there is nothing, but where there is air moving, which moves everything, where there are flies, mosquitos, bees, butterflies and birds flying, where the spiders are weaving their webs, the hum of insects and various smells, spreading pollen grains and mushrooms, where leaves and seeds are falling.
Right there, in that emptiness, in that air, is life; it’s real, it’s exactly that emptiness that unites everyone and everything. You also participate in it with your every breath, breathing in part of it, breathing out your part. You can’t live without breathing – no one can – and that’s why everyone is in connection through the air, through what you don’t even notice.
When we breathe, we smell, and it’s not insignificant. All the smells that we cycle through have been sent to someone, come up somewhere, and spread, including those that we may not feel, but that will affect us in one way or another. We are totally defenceless in the face of what we breathe in; we have not the slightest idea of how this affects us, how it changes our lives and decisions, our behaviour, our moves, how the almost unperceived smell can make us want something, do something, move somewhere, get away from somewhere.
But also vice versa. With everything we breathe out, we give the world a signal of what’s happening to us, what’s in us. Everything in us is flowing in our blood and getting into our lungs and being breathed out of there. We can’t hide it. Dogs and many other animals feel and understand our breath. Our loved ones are inhaling what we have breathed out; we are in touch with them, we all are in touch, and the air ocean is a common home for all of us.
And it’s not just smells. Through the air, through the same emptiness, voices are spreading. And not only sounds of the woods or the songs of birds, but also sounds with a very clear meaning to us – things people say and the words and phrases we hear – which can make us react in very involuntary ways.
In that same emptiness, the light, which lets us see everything that fills this emptiness, also lets us see the letters that make up the words and statements that have meaning for us, which may again make us react.
There come also touches from the same emptiness. We all feel clothes on our skin all the time, but there are also hugs, handshakes, pats on the shoulder, pokes, kisses, lashes, foot strokes, various tastes, variations of excitement, chills, tickles, desires and more.
All this comes from that place which is not, from the same emptiness that we sometimes notice.
Maybe it’s all empty.
Why the truth?
‘Not all people need to know all things,’ as one of my good friends and companions always loved to say, and this still comes to mind when someone speaks about honesty, frankness,
