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“How can emptiness be so heavy?”

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Six Word Story

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How can emptiness be so heavy? When I saw this ‘six word story’ I stopped. It is one of those thoughts so incredibly obvious yet so insightful and so simple … you have to think.

How can something not there, like emptiness or empty space, carry something tangible?

How can emptiness, nothing, be so much of a something?

question face——-

“We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

Charles Bukowski

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Well. The truth is Emptiness is a burden. A heavy burden.

And emptiness really isn’t nothing. It is made up of, well, a lot of stuff. It is a hole filled with the remnants of everything left behind. Of all things gone but not forgotten. This could include regrets, memories, past decisions and even people no longer there.

If you think about it, all the things that have touched our lives could reside in this emptiness. Paradoxically, their absence may mean that their presence is gone yet their figurative weight, their gravitas, remains. 

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“Sometimes you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty spaces it leaves behind. “

Gayle Forman

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I imagine I could offer up some flippant trite suggestions on how you can put your emptiness on a diet. Thoughts on ‘how to shed the unwanted weight.’ Or maybe suggest we think about all the silly things we do and feel which create the weight in things that are, frankly, not really there.

I will not.

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“You can decorate absence however you want ― but you’re still going to feel what’s missing.”

Siobhan Vivia

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I will not because I tend to believe emptiness will always be heavy. It will always be heavier than it should as well as heavier than we probably want. Suffice it to say emptiness = weight. Therefore, if you feel some emptiness you will be burdened with some weight. Conversely, no emptiness, no weight.

I will only suggest that we become better at carrying that weight — the burden. The emptiness will always remain <albeit we may fill it with some things which decorate the emptiness in things that make it a little less apparent> and we just learn to carry it better.

I apologize if that sounds ‘less than positive’ or not enough of a ‘here is how to shed emptiness’ type advice but, pragmatically, I tend to believe emptiness isn’t something that goes away. If something has earned emptiness status, in that it was important enough that you felt its absence, I hesitate to believe it will magically waft away like smoke.

Emptiness is simply more substantial than smoke. Emptiness is more substantial than nothingness.

Anyway.

How can emptiness be so heavy? Because that which makes up emptiness is something. In fact. Typically a bunch of somethings that matter.

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Written by Bruce