Conversations with the Void
On Questions, Stories, and the Edges of Knowing
There is a peculiar moment when you stand at the edge of something vast.
A cliff.
A bridge.
A balcony overlooking a city that seems too distant to be real.
For the briefest instant, your mind quietly acknowledges that you could step forward.
Not because you wish to.
Not because you intend to.
Simply because you can.
You find yourself daring the silence to call back, knowing—or perhaps hoping—it won’t.
The French have a phrase for this experience: l’appel du vide — the call of the void.
I have often wondered whether we have the metaphor backwards.
Perhaps the void never called.
Perhaps we did.
Perhaps the impulse is not to answer an invitation, but to ask a question. To stand at the edge of what we know, lean ever so slightly into the unknown, and wonder whether anything waits there at all.
There is an uncomfortable honesty in admitting thoughts like these aloud.
“I thought about doing that.”
To some, it sounds like confession.
To me, it has always sounded like curiosity.
For most of my life I assumed everyone experienced that distinction.
They do not.
My thoughts have never felt like instructions. They are possibilities. Some sensible, some absurd, many contradictory. They arrive uninvited, are turned over, examined, and more often than not quietly set aside.
Yes, I thought about it.
I thought about a great many things.
I only chose one of them.
Imagination is cheaper than experience.
And quicker.
It took me rather longer than it should have to realise that not everyone draws the line between thought and choice in the same place.
There are not two kinds of people.
There are as many kinds of people as there are people.
Perhaps that is why we find one another so difficult to understand.
Then again, perhaps we should begin with ourselves.
I am no longer convinced I truly know my own mind.
How often does the reason arrive after the choice? How many explanations are faithful recollections, and how many are stories that quietly make sense of what would otherwise feel untidy?
We like to imagine ourselves as authors.
I sometimes wonder whether we spend rather more time as editors.
If all the world’s a stage, then life is a script; a story, if you will, even if it is just a story we tell ourselves.
We remember in stories.
We explain ourselves in stories.
We inherit yesterday through stories.
Each morning I wake believing I am the same person who went to sleep the night before.
How do I know?
Sleep interrupted whatever thread I like to imagine joins one moment of consciousness to the next. The body changed. The brain changed. The world certainly changed.
Yet I wake, gather yesterday’s memories around me like a familiar coat, and quietly continue where the story left off.
Perhaps that is all identity has ever been.
Not certainty.
Continuity.
Or perhaps continuity is simply another story we tell ourselves.
By now I have come to suspect that the void was never about cliffs.
Nor silence.
Nor even danger.
The void is simply the name we give to the places where certainty ends.
The edge of another person’s mind.
The edge of our own.
The questions that refuse to echo.
Who am I?
Why did I choose this rather than that?
Can I ever truly know another mind?
Can I even truly know my own?
I do not know.
Perhaps nobody does.
So I speak into the void and wonder whether it will reply.
A thought in return?
If this wandering led your thinking somewhere unexpected, I would enjoy hearing where.
mental@mentalblock.net