Coming to the end of a summer filled with empty spaces of time with ‘stuff’ - conversations, internet, email, trips out to purchase things - an almost unbroken chain of action. Something about ‘doing nothing’, of entering and being in that undefined space, is oddly challenging. As if it would mark the time here as being wasted
“So what did you do at ZMM on your first week?”
“Nothing”
reads/scans as failure, as a lack of achievement or at least imagination, as avoidance. And there is a way in which one can see and interpret that ‘nothingness’ as simply killing time, a ‘waiting for’ or ‘putting off’ rather than a more intentional and full ‘being with’ or ‘immersed in’ a duration of time emptied of purpose. But even those constructions - ‘being with’, ‘immersed in’ - turns the insubstantial, the empty into a thing to occupy or hold rather than an undifferentiated space to flow and merge into. Perhaps the difficulty is that ‘to be’ is invariably, reflexively, to be a thing in our language - rather than ‘to be being’. And the moment one is a thing how can one merge with anything else without loss of self? To do so is to lose definition and boundary - the defining surface or edge that separates else from everything else: sky vs skin, surface vs space. And as with space and object, so with self and world.