The space a bowl keeps
At the end of the day, what does an empty bowl have that a full calendar doesn’t?
On my kitchen shelf, two bowls sit one inside the other. Take the smaller one out and the larger one is ready for soup. Nothing has been added to make it useful.
Chapter 11 of the Daodejing asks the reader to look at ordinary objects this way. A potter shapes the clay; the hollow is where a meal can go. The clay and the space do different work, and the bowl needs both.
An afternoon can have that shape, too. A customer calls with a question that wasn’t in the brief. A friend takes a little longer to tell the real story. If every minute already belongs to something, the welcome you meant to offer has nowhere to happen.
Reading note
Source: Daodejing, chapter 11 (James Legge edition). The everyday scene and experiment are DAOEVER’s interpretation.