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Nothing’s wrong, eh?

Nowadays, in my dotage, I sometimes notice that I can spend an inordinate time thinking of, well, nothing much; if I’m not careful, my inward gaze can seem like glancing onto a calm sea, or over a golden field of wheat on a prairie morning. At other times, though, I can feel the winds of a storm approaching and relax into the weather I have known most of my life…

I used possess a meandering brain, but even then, sometimes with few if any places I intended to visit. I mean, there’s probably not much wrong with that, except that it seemed to be a waste of time that I might have used more profitably. But then, and even now, there was always a ‘somethingness’ to nothing. I continue to be fascinated by the concept and have written several essays about nothing over the years.[i] [ii] That may be revealing, I suppose: living up to their subject matter, they got me nowhere…

Of course that’s an issue nowadays though, isn’t it? A thing has no real use unless it is part of something, for something. It has to be useful, or maybe just beautiful -but not nothing; where nothing exists, there is nothing to say about it. Maybe that’s wrong, though…

There’s the hole in a doughnut: a nothing, right? But that makes it something…[iii] I wonder if my fascination with emptiness is hardwired: I mean try to think of nothing and see how far you get. Words, ideas, random thoughts pop up like seal heads surfacing from the rippling water off the dock to look around. It seems to me that emptiness is always occupied: it is either a space between things (the Japanese concept of Ma), or a space just outside the boundary of things. Spaces can be identified, labelled as if they were something.

Of course, nowadays, emptiness can be useful: an all-purpose cleanser; it even has a name: Meditation. Unfortunately although I have practiced it for years, rather than a blank time, it is a time when thoughts escape to run riot. But it seems to me that there can be more to nothing than emptiness: silence; more to silence than nothing.[iv] More to absence than nothing… I wonder if there can ever be an empty space; wouldn’t it always be redolent of what it once contained: ghosts of something?

Could a place where a friend and I used to meet every Saturday afternoon month after month ever be empty just because she wasn’t there…? It was our place and we wore it like a coat.

Joan was a special person; even though she was much older than me, our time together was never uninhabited. We would fasten onto a subject and make it and the Food Court our own for the afternoon.  

We always preferred the Cafeteria in the local mall. Its bustling activity and random bickering at nearby tables served as a goad for our enthusiasm. Noise is often a catalyst, and the twinkle in her eye when a passing child tugged angrily at its mother’s hand signalled Joan’s determination to incorporate it into our discussion.

The child usually wanted a sugared doughnut as did Joan, so with the heaven-sent reminder, she would follow them to the counter and buy several doughnuts along with another coffee for us. I mean what serious discussion can ever start without a second coffee and extra doughnuts?

Politics, Music, Literature, Philosophy were all fair game for us; neither of us came prepared; the subjects simply birthed themselves each time we met. The crowd was the midwife; our minds the babies. We both understood how dependent we had become on others, and Saturdays usually had ample midwives to ease the birth of our ideas… Except the time it didn’t.

I’m not sure why the turnout was so minimal one Saturday, but I could tell by Joan’s face that she regarded it as inauspicious -a ‘rainy day,’ as she put it.

I smiled at her metaphor: it was a sunny winter day outside, and yet she’d fastened her greying hair into a formal bun instead of letting it hang in loose curls over her shoulders; and she was wearing a rather dowdy ankle length grey woolen dress which was unusual for her and which, for some reason, served to accentuate the wrinkles on her face I hadn’t noticed before.

“Wow,” I said, when I saw her sitting at our special table with two or three doughnuts  on a paper plate in front of her. “You’re thinking ahead today, Joan,” I added with a smile.

She answered with a weak smile of her own. “A good idea at my age, eh…?”

Something was wrong; I could feel it, but I was sure she’d tell me about it once we started talking. “Pretty empty in here today isn’t it?” I looked around the room and sighed. “How are we ever going to find a subject to talk about when it’s so quiet…?”

She nodded, her mind a hundred miles away. Then she sighed. “When the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”

I stared at her for a moment. “You’ve been reading Kahlil Gibran…”

Her smile returned. “I knew you’d recognize the passage, G.”

My eyes widened; Joan wasn’t like this. It was the last line in Gibran’s poem about Death. “But…” I hesitated. I wasn’t sure what to say.

“The doctor told me the results of the biopsy yesterday.”

Joan hadn’t mentioned anything about a biopsy until now. “You never said anything about getting a biopsy…”

“Breast,” she said with a crooked little smile. “No family history, and I’m BRCA2 negative…” An involuntary sigh escaped her mouth as she smiled. “It’s treatable, but I may miss the occasional Saturday Food Court appearance…”

I was silent for a moment. I realized that only Joan would choose to break the news about a cancer diagnosis with a quote from Gibran. “I…” I felt choked up for a moment and she could see it in my face.

“It’s not all bad, G,” she said, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. “I’ve never been able to dance…” she added, and then giggled like the little girl she was inside.

She had evidently been disguising the advanced stage of her disease, and the treatments it necessitated, because I saw her less and less at the Food Court, and more and more at the hospital where she eventually died.

It was a few years ago that she passed away, but I still look for her at our table on Saturdays, hoping she’ll show up again, for some reason. But, in truth, she’s always there…

[i] https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2025/05/07/how-like-a-winter-hath-my-absence-been/

[ii] https://musingsonretirementblog.com/2022/12/11/the-undiscovered-country/↗

[iii] https://musingsonretirementblog.com/2019/03/03/holier-than-them/

[iv] https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2024/04/17/who-has-heard-the-seasons-pass/

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