“To love is to be in a state of perpetual want,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, a line that pierces straight to the heart of our restless condition. Love, for Nietzsche, was not a serene harmony but vital turbulence: the current that keeps existence in motion. To love is to reach, to desire, to yearn for what we can never wholly grasp. It is, in his view, the very expression of life’s creative yearning, the same force that drives the artist to paint, the thinker to question, the body to live.

Love, then, is not peace; it is movement. It creates a gap in the heart, an ache, a leaning, a pull towards the other. Even in moments of deep intimacy, something remains beyond reach: the ungraspable interior of the beloved. We can touch, but not merge; understand, but never exhaust. This distance is not the failure of love but its condition. Love requires the space between to stay alive.

The Buddha often refused to answer vague and unprofitable questions, which he called avyākata, meaning “undeclared,” neither affirming nor denying them. These were not seen as irrelevant but were deliberately left unanswered because they do not directly lead to relief from suffering.

Such questions include enduring speculative puzzles, such as whether the universe is eternal or not, whether the self is identical with the body, whether, upon death, the liberated being continues to exist, or whether there is or is not a soul.

Refusing to assert or deny is not a sign of ignorance. Instead, it is a compassionate and practical response. Engaging in such speculation often causes people to become trapped in mental loops, confusing permanence with impermanence, fixating on views, and polarising eternalism, such as the idea of some permanent essence, against annihilationism, which is the belief that selfhood ends at death.

Both extremes can hinder clarity, tranquillity, and dispassion, ultimately preventing freedom from suffering.

There is a certain stillness that grief brings. It is not merely an empty space, but a slowing of the world around us, a quieting of urgency, a halt to the impulse to fix, solve, or explain. In grief, life no longer flows in straight lines. Instead, it folds back on itself, weighed down with memory and absence. We are faced with a truth that cannot be altered: something has ended, or someone we love is no longer with us.