Beyond Meaning: Attending to Absence in a Fragmented Reality

The sensation arrives first as pressure behind the eyes, a kind of exquisite tension that forms in the space between seeing something and knowing what you've seen. Not pain exactly, but the nervous system's attempt to hold incompatible signals, like the moment you wake in an unfamiliar room and your body knows it's wrong before your mind can name the strangeness. The weight of meaning crashes against its absence. Breathing changes. Something in the chest constricts around a question it cannot formulate.

We are asked to live inside systems that simultaneously demand meaning-making and render it impossible. The algorithms that determine what rises to our attention harvest our movements, clicks, lingering glances, manufacturing urgency from patterns while reducing us to them. The body absorbs this contradiction. It shows in how we hold ourselves, the micro-tensions in the jaw and neck, the half-conscious checking behaviors, the way attention splinters then desperately tries to reconstitute itself. We've been taught to understand this as personal failure rather than structural violence. The language of productivity, optimisation, mindfulness, all these frameworks position the problem inside us rather than recognizing how we've been positioned inside the problem.

Perhaps meaning never functioned as we imagined. The ancient Greeks had no single word for what we call "meaning" they spoke instead of telos (purpose), logos (reason), or sometimes simply arete (excellence or virtue). Meaning wasn't something you found but something you practiced, not a hidden treasure but a rhythm of living. The philosopher Merleau-Ponty suggests that meaning emerges at the intersection of body and world, in the liminal space where perception meets what is perceived. Not inside us, not outside us, but in the electric current between. We've mistaken meaning for content when it might be closer to contact.

The body knows things the conscious mind cannot articulate. When meaning fragments, the first response isn't cognitive but visceral, a contraction, a turning away, sometimes a subtle nausea. These sensations aren't failures to understand but understanding in a different register. What if we refused the demand for articulation, for the packaging of experience into consumable units? What if the most honest response to the fracturing of meaning isn't to search harder for it but to attend differently to its absence? Not filling the void but inhabiting it differently. The Japanese concept of ma, negative space, interval, gap, suggests that emptiness isn't lack but potential, not absence but plenitude of a different order.

The pressure behind the eyes returns, but now it carries a different quality, less panicked, more attentive. The sensation of meaning slipping away becomes not a crisis but a recognition, like feeling the tide pull sand from beneath your feet. You don't resist the undertow but learn to stand differently within it, to feel how it reshapes the ground. The question remains unanswered but somehow more precisely formulated, not "What does this mean?" but "How am I being shaped by the demand that everything must mean?" The body still knows the answer before language can reach it. The breath still catches. But now there's a recognition in that catching, the start of a conversation rather than the mute panic of something essential slipping away.