Tao Te Ching 11

We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a home, but it is the inner space that makes it livable.

We work with being, but non-being is what we use.
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This is one of the few times when I will quote an entire chapter from the Tao Te Ching. Chapter 11 profoundly demonstrates the value of emptiness and invites us to become more aware of it in and around us. It’s an invitation to insight.

Emptiness is essential; it can be found everywhere. If there were no empty spaces within letters and between words, there would be no communication, no understanding. If there were no empty spaces between the notes we hear, there would be no music, no rhythm, and no harmony.

We describe silence as golden because it is empty of sound. We relish a clear, thus empty sky or the clear breaks between passing clouds. Pain makes us grateful for its absence, a form of emptiness. We eat, and thus live, only because we experience being empty.

Reunion is made joyful only by the separation that opens space and time between us and a loved one, a form of emptiness. Absence, we’re told, makes the heart grow fonder. We know the feeling of joyfulness only because we know we know what it means to be empty of joy.

Being fruitless gives meaning to being fruitful. A glass half full is given meaning only by a glass half empty.

Many of these examples are trite, I know, but they open the path to a significantly more profound meaning of emptiness that the Tao Te Ching will address later. For now, it’s enough to contemplate that non-emptiness exists only because emptiness exists. As with all dualisms, we can’t have one without the other. Therefore, everything that we use and enjoy emerges from and is dependent upon emptiness.