The Muscle of the Soul

There are three states I have returned to often enough to recognise their contours: suffering, guilt, and what is sometimes called the existential vacuum. They are not the same. They feel different, they unfold differently, and they ask for different responses. But they share one feature: none of them resolves itself through waiting. Each, in its own way, places a demand on us.

Suffering is the most familiar. It arrives uninvited, sometimes briefly, sometimes with a persistence that reshapes the landscape of life. It unsettles the sense of order we rely on and exposes, often abruptly, how little control we truly have.

Like anyone, I try to avoid it, and to minimise the harm I cause to others. But there are forms of suffering that cannot be prevented or assigned to fault. When they come, the question is no longer how to escape them, but how to meet them. What they seem to require is not explanation but response: a capacity to remain present, to endure without closing, and to take stock of what has been altered.

Over time, I have come to think of this as the slow formation of a kind of inner strength — not resilience in the usual sense of “bouncing back,” but something more cumulative. A capacity that is shaped precisely in not turning away. If there is such a thing as a “muscle of the soul,” it is built here: in the repeated act of staying with what one would rather avoid, without collapsing into it.

This is not a romantic process. It is often quiet, and often invisible. But in periods of relative stability, it helps to remember that suffering is not an anomaly. Ease is. A brief look at history, or at the present condition of most people, makes this difficult to deny. That recognition does not lessen suffering when it arrives, but it can place it in a wider frame — one that allows for a certain sobriety, and occasionally, for gratitude. Not as consolation, but as orientation.

Guilt is more complicated, and more difficult to think about clearly. It rests on the idea that something could have been otherwise — that we could have acted differently under the same conditions. This assumption, taken in its absolute form, becomes less convincing the more closely one examines it.

Our actions do not arise in isolation. They are shaped by temperament, by history, by context, and by the particular configuration of a moment. To imagine returning to that exact configuration — inner and outer — and choosing differently is, at least in many cases, an illusion produced by hindsight. The mind reconstructs the past using information unavailable at the time, then judges the earlier self against this revised version.

This does not eliminate responsibility, nor does it render guilt meaningless. But it shifts its function. Guilt need not be a tool for condemning the person one was. It can instead become a way of seeing more clearly: what one did, what one failed to see, what one might recognise next time. In this sense, it contributes to the same slow formation as suffering. It refines perception. It adds nuance. It makes future responses less blind.

What it strengthens, if used carefully, is not self-judgement but discernment — another aspect of that same inner capacity.

The existential vacuum is different again. It is not marked by intensity but by absence: a flattening of significance, a sense that nothing quite matters, or that one is unable to connect to what might. It can present as indifference, paralysis, or a diffuse, pervasive disorientation.

What is difficult about this state is not only the emptiness itself, but the experience of being unable to move within it. Even small tasks can feel disproportionate. The world remains as it is, but one’s relation to it has thinned.

In my own life, these periods have tended to be temporary. Something — a project, an encounter, an idea — eventually reintroduces direction. But even brief experiences of this state make it easier to recognise how different it is for those for whom it does not lift. For whom it is not situational, but enduring. That distinction matters. It calls for a certain restraint in how quickly one reaches for explanations or solutions, and a greater sensitivity to how isolating such a condition can be.

What has been of some use to me here is a deliberate form of recollection. Not an imposed positivity, but a conscious act of bringing into awareness what remains intact: relationships, basic stability, small points of contact with the world. This does not resolve the vacuum, but it can reduce its density enough to allow for movement.

And movement, even minimal, seems to be the decisive factor. A single action — small, almost negligible — can begin to re-establish a sense of orientation. Not because it solves anything, but because it interrupts the inertia.

At the same time, these gestures are rarely sufficient on their own. Without some form of direction — something that extends beyond immediate mood — the vacuum tends to return. What appears to counter it most reliably is not introspection, but involvement. A sustained orientation toward something or someone beyond oneself.

Meaning, when it recedes, does not usually return as a revelation. It returns through contact: through attention, responsibility, and participation in what is at hand. In that sense, it is less something one discovers than something one gradually re-enters.

And perhaps this, too, belongs to the same underlying formation. The capacity to remain, to see more clearly, and to re-engage — even when inclination is absent — are not separate skills. They are different expressions of the same accrued strength, developed slowly over time, often without notice, and recognised fully only when it is required.