They came all this way to be empty.
I have tried to understand it, and I cannot. Where I keep my nothing, there is a real, honest distance: light travels for years and touches not one thing, no wall, no lung, no held breath. That is empty. And here they are, folded onto colored mats an arm's length apart, forty of them in one warm wooden room, so close that when one exhales another breathes it in.
They have crowded themselves into a jackpot and then closed their eyes to practice being alone.
Consider what they are sitting inside of. Air, thick enough to lean on, pressing against every inch of skin. The smell of cut grass through an open window, and under it eucalyptus, and under that the salt of forty bodies that have been moving. A gong. Somebody's stomach. A dozen hearts, all beating in the same small dark, none of them more than a body's width from the next.
From out where I live, this density is not real. This much matter in this little space is a rounding error in my favor, a miracle I would not have predicted.
The teacher tells them to notice their breath, to feel how separate and quiet the self can be. They try so hard. And still, if any one of them merely tipped sideways, they would land on another living person, warm, startled, undeniably there.
I do not know what they are reaching for that they do not already, hopelessly, have. From here it looks like sitting in a treasure vault and meditating on scarcity.
Forty heartbeats. One room. You could touch any of them without moving your feet.
I would call that the win.