OF the MANY holey lessons The donut teaches us, none is more important Than the value of emptiness.

According to American folklore, Captain Hanson Gregory is credited with the invention of the donut hole in 1847. Before this, common doughnuts (or oly koeks) were simply round dough balls sweetened, spiced and fried.

Hanson Gregory did not like the doughnuts his mother made on his ship. When the doughnut’s outside was cooked perfectly, the inside ended up doughy and cold. If the inside was well done, the outside became oily and burned, an impossible confectionery conundrum.

One fateful day at sea after Hanson had choked down another one of his mother’s doughy wet messes, he was suddenly consumed by the white hot fire of divine inspiration and EUREKA!!! He was inspired to cut a hole in the dough so that it could cook more thoroughly from the inside out.

The result was pure perfection, a radical shift in donut consciousness. By removing the center, the doughnut cooked perfectly all the way through in less time, true addition by subtraction!

This technique can be immensely valuable in every aspect of life, especially in creative endeavors. It is astounding how often the removal of clutter and obstruction improves aesthetic balance in a painting, a design, a color palette, a recipe, a poem, a song, a novel, literally any composition.

It is the same with all of us witless trifling homo sapiens. It seems that every single one of us has a gaping hole in our center, a hole in our soul that we are constantly trying to fill with 31 flavors of folly. What we don’t realize is that the hole is there by design; it has always been part of the plan.

Without it we wouldn’t laugh, we wouldn’t cry, we couldn’t create, we wouldn’t even try.

It is this emptiness that makes us who we are. We are, every one of us, defined by what’s missing.

EMBRACE THE HOLE.

-Jon Von Funk