Nothing lasts—an acknowledgement of the way of things, the indefatigable efforts of entropy. Desires, aversions, feelings, thoughts, opinions—all fleeting, lost eventually to the fading memories of time. Yet, knowing this, we still place such importance, such vehemence, upon these things; conveniently forgetting they are impermanent, yet our lust for permanence is insatiable.
Decision by decision, brick by brick, we build lives on shifting sands, sandcastles to be washed away in the tide. Thoughts—despite being constructed in ephemera, the past and future—appear as fact, monoliths of truth, add the illusion of control and safety to an existence that contains neither. And so we masquerade—peacock-like charades of how successful, how beautiful, how intelligent, how kind we are, while internally our thoughts and emotions churn amongst the uncertainty.
Paradoxically, contentment can be found in the nothing—beyond thoughts, decisions, preferences. For in the present—absent of past and future—anxiety, doubt, fear, separation of self, cannot exist without anything to cling to; without an imagined remnant of the past or an imagined glimmer of the future. In this sense, nothing really is greater than something. In the nothingness—the great suspended unknowing of mind before thought exists—is the abode of contentment.
There is no thing greater than nothing.
