the mind’s stomach
People talk about emptiness. I talk about hunger. Hunger is primal; it’s necessary. One simply cannot do without satisfying hunger. And in a way, I live by satisfying those necessities, for if I did not, I would perish.
I want to talk, today, about the feeling of emptiness. This is, I think, a very common explanation of depression. To many, this feeling is considered to come from some mysterious origin, some place that is obfuscated from any anatomical locale of the body. This is confusing for people because they don’t know how to diagnose a problem if they cannot identify the symptom’s area of effect.
Emptiness is hunger. But unlike a hunger of the stomach, this kind of “emptiness” is one of the mind. Think of your stomach growling at you to tell you that you need to eat something. Why is it unconceivable that our unease in the mind is also telling us that it needs to be filled? The only difference between the stomach’s hunger and the mind’s hunger is that we’ve been taught how to interpret the signals that our stomach gives us.
We’ve not yet been taught how to interpret the emptiness of the mind because it’s not as common and not as severe as hunger of the belly. If you do not eat (for around a month), you will die. If you do not feed your mind for a month, you will live (practically comatose, however).
You’re smart, so by now, you’re almost certainly wondering what the input for the mind is. I mean, to satiate an empty stomach, you eat food, but how do you satiate an empty mind?
This may be the reason that we have not recognized the mind as something that needs to be filled regularly; we have no clear conception of what fundamental things need to go in to fill it up. It’s not as easy as putting calories into the stomach. Or is it?
The mind needs novelty. It needs something to chew on (pun intended). And just like your stomach gets tired of eating the same shitty bplate freshly bowled dish with no beans, every single monday, your mind gets tired of solving the same problems and having the same thoughts over and over again. Little by little, our consumption of these foods decreases because we can no longer tolerate it. Eventually it gets to the point where we don’t want to consume any more.
This is emptiness.
This is what we need to solve when we speak of emptiness. We need to feed our minds with new food, new thoughts, new emotions, new experiences, new people. Things that make our minds light up in excitement and youth. This is why we search so intently for love: it is new every single time. It is the one thing that will guarantee, with 100% success, to fill up your mind every single time.
Other things will fill your mind’s cry for novelty, but these are far more difficult to find and the payoff is much less certain.
Novelty requires action, it requires going places you’ve never been before, doing things you’ve never done before. Anything as long as it’s not passive. The more senses you engage, the better.
