Joanna Bome Kure

It was a dull Monday afternoon when I got the invitation to be a guest writer on Achenyo’s Musings. My day, having started in the early hours of the morning, was progressing at a pace I did not appreciate. It was the nineteenth day of January. The time of the year when it starts to be quite awkward to wish anyone a happy New Year. The nineteenth, that time of the month when one is reminded of how far one is from receiving a salary. There I was, suited up as a serious senior staff of the Federal Government of Nigeria, not drafting memos or conducting any other business of government, but pondering what to write on a blog about thoughtfulness.

Thankfully, I had ample time to ponder. The delight of being a federal government worker in the first few weeks of the year was knowing that there was only so much work to be done without a budget – save for those who worked in, say, the Presidency, the Budget Office, or the Appropriations Committees in the National Assembly. Many of my ‘Ogas’ played peekaboo every now and then, stopping by only on a need-to-be-there basis. Foot soldiers like me could never dare. And so, with an excess of time, I kept pondering, skimming through old scribblings, hoping to find inspiration. Nothing.

The blankness in my mind existed for two reasons. I did not know the topic to write about, nor did I know what genre to employ. Was I to write an essay, creative non-fiction, or fiction? One would expect that in the state of tabula rasa, I found myself, I would shut my computer down and try another time. But I persisted, fruitlessly at first, then surprisingly found the inspiration to write about nothing.

Yes, nothing. Blankness. Darkness. Emptiness. Space. The Deep. The more I mulled on it, the better I got at shaping something from a void. A las! My mind drifted to the utter chaos of Genesis One. The one in which God’s Spirit moved over – mulled on, pondered about, if I may so stretch it. The one that persisted till there was a Command, “Let there be light.”  And there was light, just as I had written over three hundred words from ruminating and allowing my mind to hover about the nothingness in my head.

This was a lesson for me, as I hope it is for you, to sit still in the silence and cluelessness of our lives and not be too uncomfortable with emptiness. When I attempted to write the first sentence of this piece, I was clueless about how it would end. My mind insisted on calmness, and I am thankful I respected it by not closing my laptop and running off to scroll my phone mindlessly, allowing the chattering of others cloud my mind. As images of the triune God who created our big, beautiful world, there is creativity in us. Are we prepared to nurture it even when it appears empty, void or amounting to nothing?

This writing was first published on Achenyo’s Musings.