URSABLOG: A Whole Lotta Nothing

Nature abhors a vacuum, and it is not alone. Humans don’t like emptiness either and strive to fill it with meaning – or meaninglessness – depending on their mood. When I was still on Instagram and Facebook, I was puzzled by the constant advertisements for computer games that had Unique Selling Points with taglines like: “Guaranteed to kill time” or “You will be instantly addicted”. Some of them even tried to suggest that playing them would increase your cognitive powers, although it seemed to me that this was just an excuse to waste hours on end making meaningless choices that resulted in worthless prizes. I suspect that once you were addicted to these games the adverts for online casinos, or Splurgecoin investment would follow.

Part of the reason I left social media – if I am honest – is the amount of time it stole from me once I went down one of their cleverly crafted rabbit holes. One minute you were admiring a beautifully decorated library, and the next you were seeing adverts for interior decoration (in dubious taste) or auctions of first editions of books that I would never buy, let alone read. And all the while time – like an ever-rolling stream – would disappear into another lost evening.

The only time I binge watch series is when I am ill, as if my mind is too weak to absorb anything meaningful and cannot resist dragons, or suits, or the manufacture of crystal meth. I know when I am getting better when I put my phone down in disgust with myself and go and try something less boring to do instead, like reading a book, however self-isolating, anti-social and selfish it seems to be.

People often tell me that I should rest more, but in turn I often ask what they mean by rest. It turns out that they mean binge watching on Netflix or wherever, or hanging out in faceless bars with people they would rather not hang out with, just to pass the time. In Greece I have always found it slightly testing when people ask whether I find it depressing or lonely travelling by myself. When I reply with my reasons – better to travel alone than not at all, and better to travel by myself than with people that I don’t really know or like – they then usually express surprise and admiration that I could actually do this, as if I possessed superhuman powers of stoical energy. And I suspect that even then they don’t quite believe me, that there must be something wrong with me, or I am getting over some desperate heartache, and need to suffer and recover from my unnamed grief alone.

That said, if I am not relaxed, I cannot relax, if you see what I mean. It needs a couple of days – or more – of working off the stress and rhythms of everyday life before I can contemplate the nature of the universe in peace and serenity. Getting there may mean over-drinking, over-eating, running around every museum and art gallery of whatever flavour, every ruin, old church, or place of interest that I can find on the map, or climbing up thigh-straining, lung-busting mountains, or undertaking never-ending hikes, just to get to the tipping point when doing nothing seems like a better idea. If my phone is with me, I find the process of getting there is longer. If I am interrupted by work, I never get there.

But getting there is worth it, as the times when I have actually arrived have shown. It is at that point when my brain – unhooked from the usual patterns of life – starts floating freely and the synapses begin to make new connections, and my mind, in grateful thanks, comes up with a surplus of new ideas. There is a gap however, between arrival and when my mind starts creating, that space where the brain is freely floating, and it is heavenly in its nothingness.

I am coming to believe that there is a place for pure, unadulterated and uncorrupted nothingness. We are so focussed on what is happening and what has happened that we pay no attention to what didn’t happen, what could have, or maybe what should have.

Instead of computer games – or social media – on my phone, I have a stock market trading app that I look at once a day or so to manage some fairly insignificant amounts of stocks that I hold. They are not the usual ones that everyone else has, or ones recommended by the plethora of investor advice out there (another endless rabbit hole) but ones that have sparked interest from the news or from within shipping. Occasionally – usually when the price of a particular stock has risen or fallen suddenly – my finger hovers over the ‘sell’ or ‘buy’ button, and sometimes I sell or buy. Mostly, however, I hesitate, and ‘wait and see’. Whether that proves to be right or wrong time will tell, but sometimes doing nothing can be as powerful as doing something.

Many shipowners will tell you – to the dismay of ship sale and brokers everywhere – that doing nothing is not, by any means, the easy way out. It needs a great deal of discipline (ships are far more valuable than shares) when the siren songs – of shipbrokers, investors, family members and others – are pressing you into doing something, anything. Holding on to an idea that the markets, or the structure of the company, will do what you think it will do, when you could easily just cash in, or press the button to invest, takes self-discipline.

The Baltic Dry Index – unlike the stock markets – is a composite index of many different opinions of many different brokers on how certain types of ships on certain routes should perform in the freight market on a particular day. If there has been a fixture reported of the specific type of ship on that particular day, then their lives are very easy. If not, then they need their knowledge and expertise. Part of that knowledge is what didn’t happen, which fixture failed, or which alternative route was chosen instead of the one in question. This means taking into account something that didn’t in the end happen, but could have, or maybe even should have (time will tell) but didn’t.

I wonder if the markets would be better informed if there was an index based on which fixtures failed in the freight market, whether by owners or charterers, or by the simply bloody mindedness of either or both of the counterparties.

It despairs me whenever I see market reports or news articles that say:

“Well-known shipowner Flashman, has sold his kamsarmax GOLDEN IDEA for a massive US$ 20.25 mill, having bought it in late 2020 for US$ 18 mill, making a cool profit of US$ 2.25 mill on a ship that is now four years older. Flashman, a well-known frequenter of industry conferences, and bullish on the future of the dry market, said that it was right to cash in on the market now, and reinvest in more environmentally friendly, more modern ships when the time was right…”

First of all, I really hope for Mr Flashman’s sake that the US$ 2.25 mill profit was not the only money he managed to earn on the ship. I also hope that the market as a whole will digest that in a market he purportedly believes in, he has sold first to buy a more expensive ship later. Finally, if he didn’t sell that GOLDEN IDEA, he would have had no press coverage (which he obviously craves) but his lack of action would have been as telling (and perhaps wiser) than his action.

“Nothing will come of nothing” says King Lear to Cordelia before he casts her away. But in demanding something false instead of truth, the king gradually fell into tyranny and madness, and the loss of his kingdom. Something can come of nothing, if the alternative is error and folly.

And nothing is something. Cosmologically, nothing, or the thing we cannot see – otherwise known as dark matter – has been theorised as a heavy, slow-moving particle, prone to clumping, that shapes galaxy formation by drawing ordinary matter to it. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

In many parts of our lives things of substance – surrounded by noise, flashes of light, distraction and temptation – turn out to be meaningless, or worse. In the quiet spaces in between – in the actions not taken, the words not spoken out loud – that appear to be empty, where nothing resides, it is in those places where wisdom, and the seeds of success, are to be found.

Simon Ward