As you walk through the desert, encountering other people becomes scarce. It is less and less interesting to walk the path, the others seem to trigger less and less an emotion in your soul. The encounters begin to be less and less meaningful. Then they stop: nothing really moves you and nothing makes you care. You are stiff. Like a rock. Nothing surprises you. You have seen it all… or almost everything one can see during one’s lifetime. It is no longer fun; you have “consumed” or exhausted the possible situations you can encounter. Although there are still different stories, the patterns seem to be the same. Therefore, it is just a repetition.

Life has almost no mystery to offer.

And one day, you understand that “almost” has disappeared: life has no mystery to offer… whatsoever.

The last encounter is the one with the void. Since you can only encounter in the outer life what is already inside you, you know that the void around you is just an illusion: this emptiness is in fact in you.

Some people think about God during these moments. But after being an unreliable concept that was lost in the process, God plays no role. He might or might not exist, he might or might not intervene in reality, but he is not important in this final encounter. You stare into the nothingness and the nothingness stares back to you and into your soul.

People have committed suicide in situations like these.

There is nothing you can do with… nothing.

There is no lesson the void can teach you; it is simply void.

There is nothing that can fill this void.

So… you don’t try to fill it with something.

You simply take a different path: you begin to tolerate this enormous void that might be your entire existence or your very essence. You just continue your life knowing that this void is part of yourself. You go on despite the void. You go on despite everything becoming meaningless.

You go on despite not having any new encounters and possibly never encountering anything else.

You just go on.

You go on today, and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and so on.

You no longer expect to find something meaningful in your lifepath, you give up completely the quest.

You just keep going.

When everything has vanished, when everything has collapsed into the absolute void, the only “something” that remains is… yourself.

And this “myself”… continues his journey…