“The Emptiness Within?”
You must be wondering what “emptiness” I am talking about, right?
Put your hand on your heart and tell me: Don’t you feel empty inside at times?
You do, right?
Well, it’s not just you. All of us feel empty inside at some point in time. And that’s why we try to keep ourselves busy, even when we don’t have something worth doing. If we don’t find something of interest, we try to make the trivial things around us interesting. But one thing is for sure: we never want to stay idle.
Whenever we are unoccupied and idle, we become aware of an emptiness within—the emptiness that is strange, confusing, and even scary.
Let me give you a little something to ponder over.
Suppose you’re home, alone. Lying on your bed, and staring at the ceiling. After a couple of minutes, you start feeling uneasy. A kind of restlessness creeps in.
The Feeling of Being Empty Inside
Mind you, this emptiness, this uneasiness of being empty inside is not something you look forward to. Not only you don’t look forward to it, but you’re scared of it as well. And that’s why, as soon as you are aware of its presence, you try to divert your mind.
You start doing something—flipping newspaper pages, surfing TV channels, playing mobile games.
Anything.
You try to keep yourself “engaged” to distract yourself from the dreadful feeling of being empty inside. That’s why we invented goals, ambitions, and milestones. These are all tricks to fill the void —weekly goals, monthly goals, yearly goals, short-term goals, long-term goals, etc.
As soon as you achieve one goal, you immediately start planning for the next one: a better job, a better paycheck, a newer phone, and a sexier car. You can give it any name you want but in essence, it’s your effort to fill the emptiness within, (which, unfortunately, is next to impossible).
And by the way, have you ever thought why do we always try to fill ourselves up?
Why Do We “Fill” Ourselves Up?
The other day, I talked to a cousin who’s a government employee. And guess what? We were discussing corruption (How thrilling, right?).
You see, I was curious if some positive changes were taking place in the system, and if there’s some hope.
He was resentful and disappointed. He said nothing is changing and the status quo prevails. The majority of the people in the system have become corrupt and want to accumulate as much money as they possibly can. It caught my attention and I asked him why people want so much money. How much money does one need to live, after all?
He replied “It’s not about money. It’s about “I want more.”
Bull’s eye!
It’s the craving to get more and more. A mad desire to get as much as possible, and you know where is it coming from? It’s coming from that emptiness within us.
This emptiness cannot be filled with more money, more power, or more material things. Trying to fill it is like filling a letterbox with letters. Because no matter how many letters you put in daily, it remains empty, always.
Had that emptiness been outside, you could’ve filled it with something from the outer world. But since it’s inside, you need to face it and accept it as the deepest core of your personality.
This “emptiness” is something you were born with.