When Life Feels Empty

When Empty Spaces Feel Heavy

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about. Last spring, a student I’d mentored for years was hospitalized with a severe depression. I’d spent decades teaching about meaning, yet when she called, voice thin as paper, I felt utterly unprepared. I drove to her room, clutching a worn copy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—eudaimonia, he called it, the flourishing life. I thought I’d offer clarity.

I sat by her bed, opened the book, and began: “Aristotle argued that meaning comes from virtuous action, not passive suffering. We must cultivate character…” She didn’t look up. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling tiles. I kept talking, weaving in Kant and Camus, my voice steady with the confidence of a professor who’d spent 35 years explaining others’ struggles. But she just whispered, “I don’t want philosophy. I want to stop feeling this empty.” I realized, too late, that I’d been lecturing at her, not with her. The book felt like a shield. I left without a real word of comfort, only my own need to be useful.

The aftermath was quiet, but heavy. She withdrew from my classes. A month later, she emailed: “I’m sorry I wasted your time.” I’d failed not because I was wrong, but because I’d mistaken my intellectual tools for a cure. The philosophers called this logos—the word, the explanation—but I’d forgotten that sometimes, the deepest need is for silence, not wisdom.

What I learned isn’t a lesson to share, but a humbling truth: when life feels empty, we don’t need solutions. We need presence. Not the presence of a teacher, but of a fellow traveler who sits with the void without flinching. I’ve stopped bringing books to hospital rooms. Now I just sit. I listen. I let the silence speak.

The real failure wasn’t my words—it was my assumption that I could fill the emptiness. The emptiness, it turns out, is where we meet each other.

— Ray Bates, still asking questions