Nothing and Everything Matters, Act Accordingly

On the perspective from which these two look the same

I have discovered that if I sit long enough in silence, many of the insights that arrive can rarely be expressed adequately in words.

This is the problem with language.

Western speech runs on Aristotelian logic. A or B, this or that. The grammar struggles to grasp A and not-A at the same time. So when the experience comes, the words you reach for naturally distort it.

There is an inevitable betrayal in the space between what happened and what you can say about it. Even the simplest experience, if you look closely enough, slips through the net.

Direct experience often points to a paradox. Language doesn’t do paradox. It does sequence, subject, verb, object.

You end up with a sentence that is technically true but experientially a lie.

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Good News from the Void

After one particularly long period of contemplative meditation, I realised, like a bolt of lightning, and after many years of taking myself super seriously, that nothing I did really mattered. Nothing had any inherent meaning.

I know that sounds bleak, but bear with me.

There’s a level, and this is all about magnification, about the altitude from which you’re seeing, where nothing you’ve done or will do registers as significant.

That small thing you said. That embarrassing moment you’ve replayed a million times in your own head. Nobody remembers it in ten years.

Certainly, nobody remembers it in a hundred years.

From far enough out, the whole thing dissolves. And there’s a freedom in that.

You can move through the world without fear of getting it wrong, because on one level, there is no wrong. You can, ultimately, chill the fuck out.

If you’re lying awake at 3 am, certain the whole room noticed, certain it still matters, rest assured the universe hasn’t logged it.

History won’t remember. There’s a mercy in that, if you let it be so.

But that wasn’t the whole of the insight.

The opposite arrived. Same density. Same certainty. No announcement, no transition, just there, as though it had been waiting politely for me to finish with the first one.

Everything matters.

Every action will reverberate through the rest of time. Every word you choose, every small act of care or carelessness, moves forward into the world and keeps moving. Nothing you do is ever truly finished.

Therefore, act accordingly.

Two Roads, One Destination

These two didn’t hit me as opposites. They sat together as if they’d always been that way. Mirror images of one another.

The trouble with nothing matters on its own is obvious enough. It curdles into a kind of active not-giving-a-fuck. Hedonism mistaking selfishness for freedom. Nihilism, if you like. The consequences don’t care that you weren’t keeping track.

Everything matters on its own has its own unique predicament. The weight of it. Every choice, load-bearing, every misstep mattering in the grave, permanent sense.

That doesn’t equate to accountability. That becomes a very elaborate kind of paralysis.

What you’re after is something far more nuanced and subtle in nature.

Act as though everything matters from the standpoint that nothing does.

Let the stakes be real. Let the actions count. And underneath all of it, carry the ease of knowing it isn’t as grave as it feels.

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Traditional Overlap

Alan Watts talked about levels of magnification. You see something from one level. Transcend it. See differently. Transcend again, the view shifts again.

Stand in a field. The ant at your feet is having the day of its life or the worst day of its life, and from where you’re standing you can’t tell which, and it doesn’t change what you’re going to do next. Now imagine something standing over you at the same ratio. Nothing matters and everything matters aren’t competing claims about the same reality. They’re views from different altitudes. Both accurate and true.

The mistake is picking one and insisting you’re seeing the whole picture.

I realise, linguistically, this is a mess. And that’s sort of the point.

The grammar of either/or is not built for both/and. What I’m pointing at isn’t a concept you conveniently reason your way into. It’s direct experience. And what we do, consistently, is take the map of that experience and treat it as more real than the territory itself. We argue about the words. We ask whether it makes sense. We forget to cultivate the experience that would make the argument unnecessary.

One Hand Clapping

This is what koan practice is actually for. Those deliberately unanswerable Zen riddles are a means by which we break grammar until the experience it can’t contain becomes unavoidable.

You sit with what is the sound of one hand clapping for long enough and something gives. Not the koan. You. The part of you that needed the question to have an answer of the usual shape, that part quietly diminishes. What’s left is whatever was already there underneath the asking.

You don’t solve a koan. It solves you.

Zen practice doesn’t try to explain its way out of this. Instead, it creates the conditions in which you encounter it directly. Once you have, the explanation is entirely beside the point. You don’t need to resolve the tension. You need to sit with it long enough that the tension stops being a problem.

How is it possible to live as though everything you do matters and nothing you do matters in equal measure? What does that feel like? How is it expressed?

The answer is not words.

The answer is a felt sense you need not quantify with words.

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Thank you for your time and attention.

— Michael

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