Ed van Hinte

Cutting edge lightness

Almost nothing as the bottom line

It is an intriguing challenge to memorably launch lightness.

Think of ‘lightness’ and right away different meanings start quarreling for prevalence. Literally lightness is simply minimal weight, effort and energy. But this implies a wide array of other qualities: speed, freedom, efficiency, ease, and flow. To organize maximum physical lightness you need to be extremely precise, systematic and hierarchical. Everything needs to be engineered and arranged. Yet the experience of lightness suggests the opposite, as if imperfection doesn't matter and all's fine. Lightness provides the sweet feeling of the power of easily achieving, well, anything.
Lightness starts from idleness, doing nothing at all. Then these needs emerge, food, transportation, love, esteem, the familiar bunch of things we require. To fulfill those we have to become active, individually and socially. But we still ache for this godly state of laziness, and feel we should put effort in making things easier, a considerable and continuously increasing amount of effort actually. Next, before we know it, we are working extremely hard to produce things to provide time to be idle. That is techno-economic development. Doing nothing turns into a divine dream. Maybe waiting is the ultimate commodity.
To put lightness in the limelight could then mean that the bottom line is just this tiny but urgent bit more than nothing. There could be a scenario of urgent tidbits.