on emptiness

Eephus and the power of rituals

There’s a moment in Carson Lund’s baseball film Eephus where a player hits a booming, no-doubt home run off the opposing team’s star pitcher. He runs the bases and no one watches. The crack of the bat echoes into silence. Leaves snap, the field’s background music ruminates, and the uncomfortably hard dirt crunches under his feet.

The film goes on as such. For seemingly hours, the game moves on and on, the score consistently tied or close-enough-to-tie, and they play until the sun no longer presides over them, resorting to nothing but spirits and a conglomerate of headlights to illuminate the field.

“It is awfully hard work doing nothing,” Algernon says in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and Eephus is proof of that. It is not the activity, the stress of playing the game that is emphasized, but the devotion to emptiness, the faith required to find meaning in such a stillness. It is an anticipation only some are built for.

The film’s stillness is not unfamiliar, however. A nation in turmoil knows how to think about this kind of anticipation, how it lives in the body like a held breath. The waiting that happens not because we're expecting something specific, but because we are unsure of what is to come next. Because we are too scared of the future to disvalue the present.

Yes, we are escaping, but we do not desire to escape. We do not want to run away from our lives, from what we’ve built and held and loved.

But we cannot ignore the weight of staying, the exhaustion that comes from remaining present when presence feels unbearable. And still, we stay. Not because we’re brave, but because we’ve learned how to hold our breath for long stretches. Because sometimes survival isn’t about running—it’s about standing still and naming every shadow as it passes, even the ones that look like someone we used to be.

The margins of our lives are thin, and the rituals we wedge into them—grief, memory, joy in small doses—are heavy. Eventually, they’ll stop fitting in the cracks. They’ll demand space of their own, refusing to be carried quietly any longer

We are all carrying around some version of that empty field, that space where the game continues past its natural end because ending would mean returning to a world that asks us to be smaller than we are. The home run that no one watched still happened. The death that no one talked about still occurred. The love that was never spoken still lives in the space between two people, too close to touch each other, who learned that some things are too sacred to survive being named.