Running Into Nothing

The near impossibility of accepting this moment of emptiness

When I lived in Huntington Beach, California, I rarely visited the ocean. Folks would come to town and I’d shuttle them to the coast to watch surfers split the pier or gray whales glide beyond the swell. At some point someone would say something like, Wow, how lucky you are to live near all this. And as they spoke the words, all this, they’d open their arms wide to embrace the surrounding grandeur—the rhythmic crashing of waves, the sand between their toes, the breeze coating their lips with salt. I never admitted that I rarely made it down to the beach. Because how could anyone live in this place and not delight in this magnificence every single day?

It’s sort of the same now. I only occasionally indulge only in my landscape’s most medicinal detail, Carolina North Forest, a UNC-owned 750 acre tract of trees and trails situated smack in the middle of Chapel Hill. Just like Central Park is New York’s refuge from the city’s chaos, this forest, on a much smaller scale, is ours.

Instead, I mostly spend my days at home, existing on the periphery of this natural oasis. I peer out my window at squared-off bushes, parked cars, and recycling bins. There are a few trees in my complex, but I can’t claim to know whether they are black walnut or red maple or boxelder or white ash. Never have I tried to learn anything about them, or rubbed my palms on their bark, or gotten to know the birds who nest in them and sing me awake every morning.

I tally my daily steps on paved surfaces which, worth noting, is a likely contributor to my current foot ailment. The human foot, with its 26 interconnected bones, 33 joints, and its ability to move in three directions at once prefers uneven surfaces over hard and flat ones. The daily 10 milers I did on hardtop in February and March added up to a mysterious pain that only seems to diminish when I hit the trails. And yet still I linger at home, fretting the possibility that my limping gait will be the new normal. Perhaps I’ve seen my last thru hike, no more walks across America, no more in-town sidewalk saunters without this irksome hitch?

Every day I have the chance to visit Carolina North barely 10 minutes from my condo. And yet this forest sanctuary is seldom a destination.   

Which makes think about the risks that arise from habit and familiarity. About how comfort (and fear) can be blamed for life’s big misses. How something like this forest—so certain to exhilarate, enrich, and inspire—is easily neglected by my ingrained patterns of fixed behavior. By getting too snug in the vortex of my status quo.

Lately I’m navigating the residual ripples of loss, grief, and anguish. Now more than ever I scrutinize every detail of my life in an attempt to better understand it. My entire existence is under the spotlight. I hammer myself with questions like, Do I need this? Do I want this? How does this add to my life? And, Why am I still carrying this fucking thing around?

I make piles, literal and figurative, to keep and discard. I’ve deleted countless phone numbers and social media contacts, written a dozen prototype business plans, composed myriad lists of wants and don’t wants, and I know my local thrift store’s donation hours by heart. But it seems that all this doing adds up to nothing but busyness. These actions lighten my physical and energetic load, but they only offer a fleeting sense of peace.

What I need is also what I also am most challenged by. I need the opposite of busyness. I need a big dose of nothing.

Coincidentally, life is handing nothing to me in ways I couldn’t have predicted. This year’s work plans went from feast to famine on a dime, and my busted up foot put a halt on any and all adventures I had planned for at least the first half of 2024. The result—I’ve suddenly been at home longer than any stretch over the past two years.

Frankly, without gigs on the calendar or the ability to ambulate like usual, I am not sure what to do with myself. I want to be busy. I want to be doing. Not doing things makes me question my purpose. Which is proof that nothing is, most likely, precisely what I need the most.   

One of my best writing teachers, author Doug Rice, told me that creativity requires a certain degree of boredom. Solitude and silence sets the imagination free to roam. The best ideas are not born from noise or distraction—they arise from stillness, from desolation. Where in my life does this regularly exist? Nowhere. What a gift it is to be forced to contemplate nothing.

But embracing this is tough. My idea of nothing in April was to write a 150 page customer service book. My idea of nothing this month has been to design a new business model, start scanning my late dad’s boxes of photos and ephemera, and do some caretaking for my mom in New York.

I commonly joke that I’m a like a shark—if I stop, I will die. But what this statement conceals is that stopping actually stirs up my deepest fears. It resurfaces the unresolved vestiges of an anxious younger me. It reignites my childhood need for attention, my desire to be seen, and my utter desperation for safety. Stopping, when I do it anyhow, is a chance for me to parent that part of me that uses non-stop movement and busyness as a coping mechanism.

Last Thursday I abruptly interrupted my at-home flurry of list-making and obsessive organizing. I put on my running shoes, hopped in my truck, and drove to Carolina North. I parked in the dirt lot at the Unity Center and cut the engine just as my tires’ dust cloud caught up with me.

Even with doors closed, I could ear the sweeping acoustics of vibrating periodical cicadas. Creatures that emerged from the earth after living 13 years underground. Now they sing in the trees to find mates, and within 60 days, having mated or not, their large insect corpses fall to the ground.

I exited my truck, careful not to step on the winged bodies dotting the landscape. I thought of what I’d do if I only had two months to live. Surely I’d eschew my concerns about money, or business, or personal value. I’d still want to make art and go on walks as much as I could, but what I’d mostly give a shit about is my people. I’d want to make sure we spend good time together. The sort of time that makes it easy to tell each other, I love you.

Maybe it was right then I knew. Or maybe I’d known all along. But in that moment I decided to let go of most everything that has been bogging me down. A clean sweep. I’d fully accept my current moment of nothingness and trust that it will deliver what I need the most. As for those things that have been stressing me out because they matter, well, odds are they don’t really matter at all. Not enough to be weighing me down as they have, anyhow.

I tucked my key into my shorts pocket and crossed the railroad tracks into the forest. It surprised me that I made it to the Crow Branch trail without any pain in my foot. I tapped the trailhead sign with my hand and started out.

After about three, maybe four steps on the rooted single track, I sped up my gait and began running. How good it felt to open up my stride. I figured I’d stop if I had to, but until then I’d enjoy every single goddamned step, running into nothing at all.