Tuesday 24 September 2013

The Empty Space

Life is about the empty spaces.
The one between your ears of course is well, the main one.
A mixture of neurones, axons, dendrites, synapses, white-matter, grey matter.
Little stars connected by little threads, highly fluid but poorly understood.

And the brain does seem like a star chart, like a map of space.
And what is space full of?
Well, it's full of... space. Largely. It's easy.

Except, of course, it isn't. Most of our universe is missing, unexplained, currently labelled 'Dark Matter'. And we were all probably born at the wrong time to ever understand what this will turn out to be.

Space screams to be filled, with theories, with unexplained matter, with spaceships, with building blocks, with heroin.
Nature abhors its vacuum. It screams for substance.. maybe bricks and mortar, maybe new ideas. Maybe vapour or dust or dirt.. or failing that, absolutely anything else at all. Whoever heard of a choosy vacuum? (Hoover, that's whoever).

From these spaces, of course, evolve new ideas, new interests, new relationships, a new job, a new direction. Limited, stupid human concepts that are the trivia of our lives.
But what else can we do?
Nobody can deal with too much space. It's overwhelming.
Nobody can deal with too little. For pretty much the same reason.
We exist in constant renegotiation.

So we are each a squeezebox.
Squeezing in to settle well loved ideas, right ones and wrong ones. Pack them tight enough and they become delusional. Pat them down too much and their energy bleeds away.
Then recharging our squeezebox by stretching it out, creating space and giving some thought to surrendering that space to some new thing.
Squeeze in, squeeze out. Repeat.

How much gusto you do this with depends on your personality.
Like a force of nature or a ripple by lake.

The challenge is... while you're at it, try to carry a tune.

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