A Blog About Nothing

I was thinking about nothing the other day.  For those of you who know me well, you probably believe this is not noteworthy, and certainly not blog-worthy.  Most of you believe I do nothing most of the time, so I should probably be thinking of nothing while I’m doing it (or is it more accurate to say “not doing it”)?  Anyway that’s not the “nothing” I’m talking about.  I’m talking about actual nothingness, not just the absence of thinking.

What started me on this line of thought was drinking a beer.  After I finished my brew, I took a look at the mug.  It was a good mug, and it lead me think about cups in general.  Cups, bowls, and empty vessels, they are pretty important things.  But the important part of a cup lies not in what the cup is, but what it is not.  Without the empty spot in the middle a cup the cup isn’t much use.  The bowl would be a plate, a platter, or a Frisbee, or something, all of those are a far cry from a bowl.  So I though about the nothing in my poor empty beer mug and decided I need a refill.  BARKEEP…

A few days later I came back to nothing and thought I’d write this blog about it.  Maybe it’s interesting, then again maybe it isn’t.  Either way something about nothing is what this blog is mostly about.

I never realized how important nothing is to our every day living.  First of all we need lots of empty things to get us through the day.  We fill things up all the time as we get on with our daily minutiae.   Empty backpacks get stuffed, empty chairs get sat in, empty brains get filled (in some cases), empty gas tanks get filled and drained, empty lots get houses, empty closets get packed to the brim with accumulated junk, the list goes on.    We use nothing all the time and never think twice.  And it’s not just us.

On a larger, cosmic scale, nothing dominates the universe.  Not getting deep here, I’ll probably never do that (Gnarls Barkley was talking about me in Who Cares? when he sang, “It’s deep how you can be so shallow.”).  I’m talking about the actual nothingness of space.  Most of the universe consists of nothing.  Big Empty Nothing, in capitol letters.  The nothing to something ratio heavily favors the nothing side of the equation.  This is probably a good thing for us sense it keeps Earth from bumping into inconvenient asteroids, and the Sun from rubbing metaphoric elbows with other stars and in general nothing keeps us safe from galactic turf battles that would create an apocalyptic bad hair day on a cosmic scale. 

But ok, I mean space is a big place so there’s lots of room for nothing, kinda makes sense.  On the complete opposite end of the scale we still find a lot of nothing.  The atomic universe is also filled with nothing.  The space between the nucleus and the orbiting electron(s) of an atom is vacuum, nothingness.  (Before I get an e-mail from you do-it-yourself quantum physicists, I do understand the wave function of the s-orbit of these electrons may be thought of as “filling” the whole space, and the area may also be filled with weak force exchanging bosons/photons between the electron and nucleus. But for the sake of this blog we’ll call that nothing, since it’s still vacuum.)  And outside the atom there’s still nothing; nothing between the atoms themselves.  Admittedly a little less nothing in my granite counter top compared to Number One Son’s inhaler, but still nothing inside everything we think of as something.  That’s a lot of nothing floating around out there not just in the bottom of my beer mug.

Not only is nothing important on a physical level, we need nothing on an emotional level.  How often do we look forward to doing nothing?  When the chance arrives people will set aside a weekend to do nothing.  It’s almost like scheduling an anti-vacation.  We set aside the time in advance, plan what we will not do, and look forward to the big, empty weekend.  Then we return to work on Monday and tell our coworkers about “wasting” two straight days.  The exploits attract envious stares that almost rival descriptions of fantastic Caribbean getaways (that feature doing nothing just in a more exotic location, with suntan lotion, and frozen drinks).  Doing nothing provides us a moment to recharge the batteries for the 90% of the time we are doing something.  If you have kids that percentage may be 110% of the time.

This Thanksgiving when you take your annual minute recite the list of things we’re supposed to appreciate every day (but still don’t) things that fall in some form of “health”, “wealth”, and “family” add “nothing” to this year’s list.  You may get a funny look for saying it out loud around the table, but who cares?  You may also get a funny look for accidently sloping pumpkin pie on your shirt, but it won’t stop you from eating it anyway.