emptying emptiness

on the occasion of this Ash Wednesday, i've decided to give up hopelessness. for many, refraining physically is a struggle that inevitably causes mental exertion and its resulting restructuring. while small personal sacrifices of meat and cigarettes reinforce new behaviours and, consequently, attitudes that benefit those who abstain and, perhaps, by extension, the general population and the natural world, i find it much too easy to "give up" something without it translating into a cognitive/moral reorganisation. if the great well of the world's suffering could be assuaged by the legalistic snipping out of habits, by superstitious avoidance of certain objects, then it would have already been done by people for whom thought and action, belief and practice, are superimposed—and yet without any real reconciliation having been wrought.

yet i firmly believe that this period of Lent does call us to define something and then, determinedly and devoutly, to turn away from it with sharp corners—a 40-day period of negativity. Lent engenders a belief—a conception—that a gaping abyss exists in such a way that the practice of denial from certain things can cast these very ones into it and, indeed, that it may begin to be filled. at the same time, the weeks of conscious abstinence reiterate the sheer irreconcilability of the tiny scraps we would throw into the depths and their magnitude. it might be "better," in some ways, to adhere to another tradition in which an act is done additively, in which something is pursued positively, in which we seek to build a mountain rather than fill a hollow. however, this is not the language of Lent (perhaps it is that of Easter and, i might argue, the difference between the two is that which bestows on Easter its radiance, its focal status). just as the language of Advent is that of waiting, that of Lent is depravation.

consequently (and not merely semantically), i will attempt to give up a lack, with the ardent desire that two negatives will react with multiplicative certainty as opposed to additive precariousness.

this period will also, incidentally, be marked by the holding of my tongue from its usual piping correction of those infractants who would use the word "hopefully" to indicate something very different from their own state of doing whatever act occurs separated from this term by a (frequently omitted) second comma. instead, i choose to believe—at least during the span in question—that, in uttering such, the speaker really does do so with hope. full of it, in fact.