Sufficient

He looked down into the crevasse. “What is down there?” he quietly asked himself.

“Nothing you nor I can appreciate,” she said.

Without looking up he replied, “You weren’t there before.”

“How would you know? You never looked.”

Still staring into the abyss he sighed, “And if I don’t look now, how can I be sure you’re really there?”

“Ahhhh,” came her barely audible reply.

The depth seemed encompassing. As he stared he felt himself meandering; fearing losing himself, he reached out to the only other thing present. He slowly turned and immediately regretted it. There she stood, fingering her hair. He knew what she was doing, though it would be silent to any potential on-looker. Every unsure motion of her body; every emotional façade she wore; every shy nuance was a thousand quiet retributions for the pain endured many years ago.

He wanted to yell. He wanted to shout that it wasn’t his fault. He had no control and there was nothing he could do. He wanted to scream until he was hoarse, but he was tired. His exhaustion won and he found himself speaking his mind.

“What do you mean ‘nothing neither you nor I could appreciate’?”

“You were staring where no light shined. You listened for sound that would never come. You stopped to feel warmth that can never reach you. What exactly were you so focused on?”

Tired of her evasiveness, he closed his eyes, rubbed his brow, and played along. “So it’s not interacting with me.” His eyelids slowly raised and he looked at her through tired eyes. “It can do nothing to affect me. If it can’t interact with the world around it, it may as well be nothing.”

She stared icily. “Exactly,” she said curtly.

He didn’t know what she meant. He didn’t even know what question to ask. He didn’t respond. He tried to let his mind wander, but he couldn’t. She demanded his attention. His mind couldn’t relax to think what this could mean, nor could he allow himself to address the real questions in his mind; she stood there drawing his senses. He didn’t know what to do and found himself again speaking his mind.

“You’re right, I don’t appreciate it.”

Something flashed across her face. Compassion? Understanding? He couldn’t tell, but her face had softened. She walked toward him and peered into the crevasse, holding the same pose he had minutes ago. Staring down into the hole, she spoke.

“You’re not the only one. It’s the way we are. We always look for the loud, the exciting, the disruptive. We all believe that this is where importance lays. It’s natural - it’s what we notice. Of course we will be drawn to the things that draw our attention, and naturally the things that draw our attention are the things that we study. We find importance in the vast cacophony around us. We create that importance. We invest so much time and energy that it would be unbearable for our interest to be deemed trivial; so it must be important, we demand it be important. So we let others know it is important. And how do we do it? We do it the same way we discovered these important details: we shout, we make noise, we disrupt and destroy. We do and create things that people will notice and by being noticed we become important and our cause, by association, must also then be important.

“In this wake the silent, serene, and placid all are ignored, but unnoticed doesn’t mean uneventful. Imagine an engine that made no noise, produced no heat, and emitted no light. That would be the ideal engine. It means complete conversion of energy from one form to another - nothing lost to friction or entropy - it simply remains whole. Perfect efficiency. This would allow unmitigated access to the scant resources around us. We would be able to tap into the unharnessed energy all around and transform it into the usable energy we need with no fear of losing one iota of it to the disorder of the void. We'd not fear the gradual warm death of the universe because we would reach into the chaos and bring back order from the bedlam it was condemned to. But you would never notice this wonderful creation. If you did happen to stumble across it, you would simply see a cold, empty, dark nothing. You would discard it as such or, perchacing you were able to notice it, non-functioning.

“Imagine what this engine would mean. It would provide and lead to far more than the most destructive force ever could. Yet in its silence we would ignore it, deeming it unworthy of our time, all the while being naturally drawn to the destruction. It is what we made important.”

She remained in her fixed posture, staring down into the void. He joined her, following her gaze down to something neither could hope to see. There they stood, two figures silent and still as their surroundings. Without looking up he broke the silence.

“So the potent can remain so because it goes unnoticed. We don’t meddle and as such it doesn’t change.”

Finally she looked up at him. “It’s more than that. Because the truly important things go unnoticed they can be all reaching and all encompassing. By being unnoticed we can constantly be saturated and not be stifled. And since it is everywhere with no variation or gradation there is no fluctuation or absence to compare to. It cannot be measured and remains deemed, incorrectly, as nothing.

"This permeation allows a complete presence. The unseen and the unknown will never waver, revitalizing the elan and holding back the quietus without us ever knowing there is more beyond ourselves. If the causer is ever known, it has failed in its action.”

Staring into the void he began to understand. He would never find what was down there, because he could never notice it. Whatever was down there showed no signs of itself; any and all evidence of its existence was everywhere already, untraceable in its saturation. He would overlook it no matter how long he searched because it would be the one thing that would never draw his attention. That was how it remained hidden and unaltered, frozen at an apex, unwilling to change, because any change would be an abatement.

“So, what is down there?”

Her gaze unwavering, she softly mouthed the word, “Perfect.”

====