An image that perfectly describes this world is a horde of zombies: heartless living dead, barely capable of feeling love or seeing another person because they are too focused on themselves, heads bowed, eyes on their feet, concerned only with their own pain, their endless complaints and sorrows.
Their minds can only wander within their own closed worlds, while their feet drag their bodies along without direction. Some images stir a morbid fascination, and perhaps a glimpse of truth lies behind that fascination, making them somehow alluring.
This particular picture depicts a bunch of brainless creatures with just enough intelligence to move and pursue a single goal: to eat whoever is different from them, whoever is alive by comparison.
Perhaps, as they devour that person, they feel their own life returning for an instant. This resembles what someone feels when they believe themselves momentarily alive while spewing hatred, without stopping to consider whether what they are doing makes any sense. But then, how could someone think when all they have in mind is annihilation? No reasoning of any kind is required for that purpose.
And so, part of the world fantasises about extermination so that those who feel they are nobody and are completely hollow inside might have the chance to become the new chosen ones. They fervently wish for whoever seems alive—whoever is happy—to die, and for zombies to take shape outside themselves so that they can stop being zombies themselves and experience a few moments of intense life. They want to feel something in their already dead hearts.
Many indulge these fantasies through entertainment, and perhaps that soothes their dissatisfaction for a while; at least they get to play or fantasise about it.
Yet there is always someone who is not content with fantasising and gives free rein to their darkness. Some throw up their hands in horror without recognising that the same root lies within them too.
Then one zombie asks another:
“How can you keep walking without a heart?”
The joke is that it never occurs to the zombie asking the question to look in the mirror. If he did, he would immediately become depressed and realise that he is dead, that he is broken, that he is nothing disguising itself as something.
However, if he calms down and stops to think for a while, he also realises that there must be some life within him, because otherwise there would be no movement. So he decides to shed everything that is dead until he reaches the core, until he reaches whatever sustains him. If he finds it, he becomes happy again because he discovers that he is alive and valuable.
That search becomes his way of being reborn, of ceasing to be a zombie or the Tin Man. When he does, the world outside remains what it is: walking death. There are still zombies asking for a heart, asking for a flower to awaken something within them.
Now that he has a heart, he shares it whenever he feels moved to. Now that he has one, he does not complain that the furrow offers him nothing; instead, whenever he wishes, he plants something in it to watch a beautiful flower grow.
To ask what is hollow to give to you is not to understand.
To complain that what is hollow gives you nothing is not to understand.
Whether or not to plant in that emptiness is your free choice.