We have deliberately taken a step down from hope and gathered the courage we need to face what we fear most. The Enormity of the present moment and the irreducible uncertainty of the future tower before us, threatening to come crushing down if we are not careful.

So we look for the strongest place from which to descend – an anchor point which we can return to when the view of the abyss gets too overwhelming. We keep love in our hearts and find consolation in the wholeness and beauty of life – there is always a community we can return to when our spirit needs nourishment.

We have taken our fear as a first clue for where to direct our attention. We have honed our ability to judge the realness of reality and the imagination. Navigating by honesty and truthful relationship, we are listening at the edge of our understanding and try to get out of the way so that our preconceived notions do not obstruct our learning.

With these discernments and a reality-seeking attitude we let go of hope…

Hope that the long-term future will be a progressive leap forward from where we stand.

Hope that the broken past does not continue to manifest as violence in the world around us.

Hope that we can steer the course of events which are too complex and enormous to control.

We allow ourselves a reality check without blocking the consequences of what we see. We feel that reality and hold it close rather than push it away. We avoid compartmentalising the part of us that is looking at this reality and let go of the urge for solutions or fixes.

What now?

Now nothing.

This is not a thought experiment. It is an experience and experience has its own momentum. It will provoke different reactions in everyone. The challenge is to be open to its impetus and stay in this space.

Can we stay in this space?

If we have the courage to stay here, there is no way around the enormous force it exercises on our person. If our whole understanding of the future is slipping this quickly reaches our viewpoint in the present where it threatens our self-understanding and the role(s) we fill on an everyday basis. There is no pretending here.

When we stop 'blocking the shit that's going down' and give up hope that 'the shit' can be managed, governed or controlled something happens. When we see the Enormity, not as a problem to be solved but as a product of history, our roles as citizens (and humans) come into play in a fundamentally different way. Our occupational positions, our desires and habits, personal relationships and status are in play because we are confronted with a fundamental incoherence between the roles we fill on an everyday basis and the view of the future that is opening up before us. Perhaps we even sense the historical dimension to the roles we've adopted.

If society is somehow in decline, undergoing an elemental change or being uprooted, what will remain of the roles we fill within it? The roles that give meaning to our actions and values?

We can try to ignore this question and just aim to cope with the incoherence we feel is underlying our lives. Get by. Then we keep doing the same daily routines as we have always done well aware that they have become empty rituals which no longer imbibe life with meaning or purpose. We see repetition as a way to solidify our life roles, as a way of hanging on to what we value. We grow resistant to change and come to rely on self-help recipes to think positively and be happy. We try. Keep calm. Carry on. For our children, our country, our ego or the things we will lose in the fire (which are perhaps all the same thing). Slowly, we come to distrust our own sense of reality and start relying on other people's stories to give our lives meaning...

There are plenty of mechanisms that pull us back into the compartmentalisation of life but maybe the momentum of giving up hope pushes us on. Perhaps the longing for something deeper is simply too strong in us. Or we are lucky to find a place where we can articulate this slippery feeling of dis-ease and be taken seriously. A place where the sentiment takes root and becomes too tangible to dismiss.

If we see the incoherence as a sign that something fundamental is amiss and follow that through we are at a loose end – where meanings are in dissolution and nothing quite fits where it used to fit.

What now?

What lies beyond the roles we know is shrouded in darkness.

We feel that darknesss only as an absence, something we are not.

This is a circumstance that leaves us vulnerable but not powerless.

We can see the absence as another clue which helps to focus our awareness.

However, when we stare at the darkness it reflects nothing but our own blindness. So we need to feel our way around the absence to sense the shape of the hole it forms. This 'sensing' is literally like groping around in the dark, feeling the elephant's trunk, legs and tail until our perception is sensitive enough that we can understand the (w)hole. There is no skipping ahead here, so we'll have to be patient.

In this undertaking we will need to engage ways of knowing that go beyond propositional knowledge. We would do well to avoid forming propositions too early. We might even be able to see our own confusion as a strength.

Jeff Shampnois describes a form of 'negative knowledge' which in large part correlates with the awareness of absence related here: negative knowledge is "information that provokes us to open otherwise impregnable “clams” of certainty, which contain pearls of confusion". A way of knowing which allows us to be with uncertainty without automatically reaching for answers.

This means letting go of trying to fit an absence inside our established system of meaning. Jeff gives the example of how "the word nowhere does not provide any clear sense of emptiness or absence or nothingness, but provokes an image of something, somewhere. This leaves the question of a “real emptiness” unimagined, radically neutral, suspended. Thought learns in this way to stop short".

Rather than valuing absences as signs that tell us something about what lies beyond the roles and meanings we are familiar with, it is easy to "drag the information back ashore as some new certainty" if we have an ulterior motive of propping up the roles we already know.

As someone I met recently put it to me: absences are ineffable. This is not an obstacle to be overcome but a gift. We cannot press our preconceptions onto an absence without losing touch with it. So we'll have to keep feeling around the hole until we know it's shape and meaning, not as an answer to something but as an absence of something.

The ineffable is beyond words but it is not beyond knowing. It calls for a different mode of knowing than thought alone provides.

If we can accept this the work of manifesting the absence as a presence in life begins.

We do this in whatever practice we have available to us (whether it is writing, walking, painting, meditating, modelling, sailing, cleaning, body work or embroidery). We recreate a ritual within our practice – experimenting yet returning to the same position again and again. It helps us to build a deeper relationship with reality. This is a radically different kind of ritual to the repetition of routines. Rather than using repetition to reinforce our habits we are actively challenging them: the return to the same place in our practice is punctuated by excursions outwards, which point to the fact that we are never the same when we come back to our starting point. (Much like we use the form of the circle to draw new patterns that encompass and move beyond the circle itself.)

Ritual helps us to hone our perception within a practice. And this, in turn, can help our understanding of the meaning of the absences we sense in the darkness outside the world of our familiar roles.

If it is possible to approach absences in this way by continually refining our perception to them, the ineffable void may become an indicator or a signal for something within our lifeworld. Like a hand pointing at something which was always there but that was imperceptible because we were infatuated by the gesture of the hand. Absences could in this way be a fulcrum for enlarging the roles we fulfil in the everyday. A vehicle that brings news of different ways of seeing and being across from the darkness and into our lives.

Might we have found a way to bring otherness to life?

Only time and continued exploration will tell. For now we have found a small opening in the pandemonium of the Enormity, another clue to how we can navigate the uncertainty of the present moment.

Navigating by absence we see dark spots in our view of the world which point to something beyond our everyday roles. This opens up new territory rather than forcing us to put down stakes and prepare to defend the old. And when we trail what lies in these tiny cracks in fellowship with others who are moving in the same direction, we might just have the beginnings of a community which can strengthen our practice and designate new roles where the old ones have faltered.

What I am tracing here is a way to find something of value in the dark spots on our maps. In my own life, one of the most precious discoveries has been the absence of the feminine – but absence will be different to all of us. As will the ways in which they have fallen outside our view.