I am not good at doing nothing. My disposition is to strive. An immigrant's son, I always wanted to prove myself, and for the past half century this has worked for me. There has been a direct correlation between how hard I work and what I accomplish. I do not have to convince myself of the equivalency of effort and success, nor do I doubt Thomas Edison’s saying: "Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration."

So I am not particularly well equipped for these days of stillness with no direction, the lack of obvious solutions to what ails the world. Some compare our current situation to the Great Depression, when our country and indeed the entire world fell into a similar state of malaise. Roosevelt and his team approached it with a culture of action, which is still my north star. On my wall hangs a quote from FDR which reads, "Do something. If it doesn't work, stop doing it. If it works, do it some more." This calls me to "move out, get going, take action even if it’s not the right action". Figure it out as you go. Build the plane while flying it. I could go on with my clichés.

During times like these it’s easy to confuse activity with progress, even if it feels better just to go ahead and act. So here I sit feeling unproductive, thinking a bit too much, wondering when it will all "end." And this, my friends, is a complete and utter waste of my time.

Let’s go back to the 1930s again, to a joke which was as popular as it was instructive about how points of view affect our ability to move forward. I recognize that the joke contains an unfortunate archaic prototype of people in the developing world from that era, which shouldn't be overlooked, but is germane to the story.

Here goes: Two shoe salesman head out from New York City to a developing country to see if they can start an export business to supply shoes to that market. After looking around for a few days, the first salesman communicates back to the home office, "Heading back to NYC immediately stop. No business here stop. Because no one wears shoes here full stop.”

Almost simultaneously the second salesman sends his own wire to the home office: "Must stay for a month longer stop. Incredible amount of business potential here stop. No one wears shoes here yet full stop.” Two people viewing the same situation, coming to completely opposite conclusions. The first saw nothing in nothing. The second saw everything in nothing. His creativity was launched by the urgency of nothingness.

It’s clear that our world is changing, not in a gradual, evolutionary way, but in a seismic way. Many branches of science, including biology and geology, postulate that major change—from that of individual species to the appearance of entire mountain ranges—actually happens quite suddenly.

To some, this is anti-intuitive. Things always seem to stay the same, until they are not, but we never actually see or experience the time of change. However, others can point to the time, event, or person in their lives that changed everything, that very moment. From a definitive point onwards, things would never be the same. Before, and after, so distinct as to barely seem related. Are we in that moment now? What does that moment feel like? In some ways , it feels like nothingness.

This nothingness is a clear space, silent and featureless. It calls to us in an entirely different way than we are used to hearing. The God of this realm speaks in a whisper, which we cannot discern if we are always talking. Restless calls to action are noise. There is not nothing in nothingness. Rather, there is the active energy of creation. Right there, in the pause! You can feel it if you dare.

Imagine you are about to swing out into a cool, turquoise river on a long rope swing hanging from a towering cypress tree. You push off from the thick brown limb of your perch. Your momentum is outwards, propelled in a wild, glorious arc, first downwards, then up, up, up—until it stops. Then! A wonderful suspension of just… about… everything, You float. Fly. Before resuming your journey down into the cool, clear water of the river.

That floating moment, the brief interlude between the momentum of the past and the gravity of the future, is the most salient of times. Endless possibilities are contained in its nothingness.

We are rarely handed the sort of blank interlude we have today. It’s not nothing. It’s an invitation, an open door to the next something. There is an urgent power in this.

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Consider this poem, attributed to the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu:

Thirty spokes share the hub of a wheel;

yet it is its center that makes it useful.

You can mould clay into a vessel;

yet, it is its emptiness that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows from the walls of a house;

but the ultimate use of the house

will depend on that part where nothing exists.

Therefore, something is shaped into what is;

but its usefulness comes from what is not.

Lao Tzu, chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching (translated by Kari Hohne in 2009)

This nothingness calls to me with increasing urgency. I sense that the space where we are, in between this and that, may be useful, partly because it is NOT this or that. Shall I make something in this emptiness?

A couple of years ago I was surprised to see a commercial from the financial advisor Raymond James about one of my (possibly fictitious) ancestors, Vincent Brimble, who was in the bowler hat-making business.

He survived periods of financial decline by sticking to what he did best: making a fine bowler hat to the exact dimensions as he had always made them. However, his competitors followed the popular fashions of the day, making hats with ridiculous looking three-foot-tall tops. Not Brimble, he never changed. Such was his virtue.

Where did that lead? Not necessarily to "financial stability" as the commercial implies. While Vincent Brimble might have temporarily outsmarted them by not falling for those immediately fashionable extra-tall hats, sooner or later he must have been forced to deal with the future. A future where nobody needed fancy hats anymore, be they bowler or giant top. This future probably crept up on the cautious hat-maker, because he was not particularly good at change. He did not know what changed looked or felt like. To Vincent, the future looked like a black bowler hat, like it always had.

Vincent thought the useful part of what he made was the form of the hat. Yet it was really the empty space where the head would go. He could only see what was, not what might be. The future was as featureless as the calm sea he gazed out at in his well-deserved retirement. That calm was his nothingness. There was no urgency there, just the entitlement of his having lived a life resistant to the whims of change.

I must have been the product of an illegitimate branch of the family, because I don't understand Vincent. His supposed descendant , Raymond J. Brimble, stumbles around in the new nothingness of these days, like a pig digging for a root. It is my nature to believe that the current world of pause contains that root. It’s in there, somewhere, in between all the rocks which have fallen in its path. Others might determine, "nothing to find here," and move on, but I am one of those who thinks, “there must be lots of roots to find here, nobody is looking in this place for them… yet.”

The prospect of untapped territory is exciting. This is the urgency of nothingness.

The Urgency of Nothingness