When Everything Becomes Nothing

Among all the precious teachings, my favourite of Buddha’s is “Everything is nothing.”

At first it may sound heavy or bleak, but it leads toward freedom.

I used to be afraid of being nothing. It felt like the rupture of everything I had ever held on to. When I first heard the phrase, I couldn’t make sense of it. In time, it became my rock, the one thing I held on to in my darkest storms.

I thought it might be something for you to hold on to as well.

Three years ago, I took a gap year after finishing my bachelor’s. For the first time, I didn’t belong to any institution. I slipped into a kind of post-graduation depression I hadn’t known existed. My friends were moving forward with jobs and new lives. Mine felt like it had collapsed into blank days.

Being hyperactive by nature, waking up to nothing was my torture. My daily checklist rarely went further than “have your morning coffee.”

To fill the emptiness, I began to party. At first it gave me something to look forward to, a weekend to wait for. Yet, slowly the days grew shallower, and I felt like I was drowning in them.

Imagine drifting on a vast ocean. The waves are calm one moment and restless the next. Without an anchor, the current decides where you go. I was either going to end up near a shore that felt foreign, or be pulled into waters that seemed endless. That was my life then; unmoored, without direction.

To avoid risk, I leaned on old anchors. Slipping back into a version of myself that no longer fit, I stayed in touch with my ex-boyfriend. It was like forcing on jeans from ten kilos ago. Instead of buying a new pair, I chose to feel devastated that the old ones no longer fit. I was clinging to identities that had already outgrown me, too afraid to accept “just being” for a while. Being nothing.

Soon, I realised I had to trust the tide.

Then one day, I found myself in Sri Lanka, helping preschool children learn English.

At first I was terrified, not liberated.

My sister was falling into addiction at the time, and even miles away my soul carried the weight of it.

Questions echoed in me: Who am I? Where do I belong? Who do I really have in this life?

Those days taught me more than I expected.

Sri Lanka was breathtaking. Every sunset felt like the best I had ever seen no matter where I stood. I realised that the point of no direction was the best point of all.

Something in me was breaking free, though old patterns still had their way of finding me.

Then one day, a book found its way into my hands that shifted everything: The Dispossessed.

It felt like someone had written down what my life had been circling around, what I always known yet, somehow forgotten: the courage to live without walls made of possessions.

Le Guin showed me that dispossession was not deprivation but freedom. When I was dispossessed, I could no longer be mistaken for my possessions or chained to what I clung to.

When nothing belonged to me, I belonged to no one.

My worth could never be measured by what I managed to keep, but by what I set in motion; the words I spoke, the hands I held, the traces of care I left behind. Nothingness no longer meant loss. It became spaciousness, a place where change, healing, and new beginnings could enter.

When I came home, nothing had changed. Sense of belongingness was still lacking, my days still stretched out in wide nothingness. Yet instead of fear, that emptiness carried a thrill. The thrill of building something new, and the acceptance that I might never belong again.

I was everything, everything was mine and that everything, was nothing.

When Buddha spoke of “everything,” he was not pointing to a pile of objects in a marketplace. He was pointing to the whole fabric of existence: the things we cling to as ours, the identities we polish and defend, the loves we fear losing, even the pain we secretly carry like a badge.

Think of it as a collection of shells we gather on a beach. Each one feels precious in our hands: a career, a relationship, a memory, a house key, a name we answer to. We line them up, admire them, call them our own. But tides always come. Waves sweep the shells back into the sea, sometimes gently, sometimes all at once.

What remains when the shells are gone?

Nothing. And it is not a void to fear.

It is an open horizon, an unclenched fist, a chance to walk barefoot without the weight of what you thought you must hold forever.

Nothing is fixed, nothing has to stay as it is, and because of that, everything is possible.

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