I began the fourth essay in this series (Bergquist, 2026b) by considering the BIG issue: How do we make sense of a universe that emerged from nothingness. Do we grapple at all with the distant prospects of Big Silence? I turn in this essay to consideration not so much the emergence of something from nothing in the first moments of the Big Bang, but instead the interplay between nothingness and something that is enacted at every moment and in every location of our universe.
I am specifically reminded of the Mesopotamian myth I introduced in the first essay in this series. This myth concerns the Void that is present prior to the formation of an orderly world. Ruled over by Tiamat, a primordial god, this state of nothingness or disorder was experienced in real life by those living in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. Their land was chaotically flooded each year by the two rivers flowing through the Crescent. The flooding made this land fertile.
While we might not be living by a flooding river (though many of us do), there are other repeated incidents in our life in which nothingness or chaos reigns supreme. And in the very long term, we now know that Chaos and nothingness will ultimately conquer Order and somethingness. Following the Big Bang will comes the continuing expansion of the universe under the force of dark energy, leading eventually to the Big Silence.
Brugh Joy (1990) mentions some of these incidents of nothingness and chaos reigning supreme when identifying several recent calamities in recent times. I find Brugh Joy’s insights to be relevant precisely because we are being “flooded” in many ways in the mid-21st Century by conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, turbulence and contradictions (VUCA-Plus) (Bergquist, 2026a). These six conditions swirl constantly around our reality.
We are also blessed with the opportunities to be free, to savor beauty and to act in a manner that benefits all of humankind. As Brugh Joy suggests, we need our full resources to enjoy and to appreciate Life–with its unknown destiny and its unknown purposes. We also can benefit from the creation or founding of a supportive community filled with people who can bravely imagine, anticipate, and create a “wonderful world” while living in VUCA-Plus saturated conditions that seem to yield neither destiny nor purpose.
Given the challenges I have just posed, I first consider the movement from nothing to something under VUCA-Plus conditions.
