The Void Is Pregnant
That’s what I told my Breakthrough group on Tuesday night.
The void is pregnant.
And before you roll your eyes at the word void — I know, I know, it sounds like something printed on a canvas at a home goods store — stay with me for a moment. Because what Mike Searles and I talked about on our most recent live might be the most practical thing I’ve said in months.
Here’s what I mean.
When you’re actually pregnant, you sit with not knowing. You don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl. You don’t know exactly what this person will be. But you sit with the possibility of it. The dream of it. The not-knowing of it. And somehow that feels rich rather than empty.
That’s the void.
Not emptiness. Possibility that hasn’t announced itself yet.
Tuesday morning I woke up with nothing. Zero. If you’d put my creative energy on a heart monitor, I would have been flatlined. No ideas, no spark, no particular desire to do anything useful. Years ago I would have panicked. I would have forced something — written something just to write it, cleaned something just to feel productive, filled the silence with noise just to stop feeling the discomfort.
Instead I went and sat in my chair and stared at the sky.
I squirmed. I did nothing. I squirmed some more.
About ten minutes in, a thought drifted in like a stray cat arriving at a back door — uninvited, unannounced, already at home.
Two hours later I had published an article.
The void didn’t delay the work. The void wrote it.
But here’s the distinction that matters: sitting in the void is not the same as sitting with your soul.
When I sit with my soul, I bring something to the conversation. A question. A worry. Something I want to work through. It’s a dialogue — I come with content and something comes back.
The void is different. You bring nothing. No agenda. No question. No desired outcome. You simply stop — and wait in a mode of receiving rather than seeking.
That’s what makes it uncomfortable. We were not trained to receive. We were trained to produce.
The work ethic that carried most of us through forty years of career and family — the showing up, the grinding, the checking off, the staying useful — that structure doesn’t translate into retirement. It was scaffolding for a building that’s already been built. You don’t need it anymore.
But taking it down is disorienting. Because when the scaffolding comes down, what you’re left with is a lot of open space. And most of us were never taught what to do with open space except fill it.
Learning to sit in the void is the practice of not filling it. Of trusting that what wants to emerge will emerge — if you get quiet enough to hear it.
A few weeks ago I was in a difficult situation with my oldest daughter. We were planning a family gathering in September and we kept knocking heads. I couldn’t find a resolution that didn’t cost me my sense of dignity.
So I went and sat in the void. Not to think it through. Not to ask for answers. Just to surrender. To stop. To give up the frantic mental cycling and simply be still.
About fifteen minutes later my other daughter called. Out of nowhere. She said: Mom, I have an idea about how to help with this situation. She changed her entire travel itinerary — rerouted from Texas to Virginia to come stay with me instead. I never asked for that. I never even mentioned I needed it.
But something moved when I got still.
I don’t need you to call that metaphysics or mysticism or anything in particular. Call it what you want. What I know is that the answer I couldn’t force arrived the moment I stopped forcing.
The void is not navel-gazing. It’s not checked-out passivity. It’s not the absence of a life.
It’s where the life that wants to come next is quietly waiting for you to get quiet enough to hear it.
Maybe you’ll get a sentence that becomes an article. Maybe you’ll get a phone call you weren’t expecting. Maybe you’ll get a memory of something you used to love that you’d completely forgotten was yours.
The void is pregnant.
You just have to be willing to sit with the not-knowing long enough for something to be born.
About this conversation:
Mike Searles and I record live conversations about the real interior life of retirement — not the highlight reel version, but what it actually feels like to rebuild a life from the inside out. You can watch the full recording above. And if you want to go deeper into how to trust your own inner voice in the silence, my booklet Building Trust With Yourself is the place to start — available free to all paid members, or at monica@monirosesoul.com.
Thank you Levee, Michael Kuhn, Diane, and many others for tuning into my live video with Mike Searles! Join me for my next live video in the app.
