I have a favorite book on my “re-read every few years” list, it’s called Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. It sits on my bookshelf next to a small volume entitled Nothing: A Very Short Introduction by Frank Close, a physics professor at Oxford University.
I have long been fascinated by the notion of nothingness. It’s an enigma, a conundrum that has intrigued and bedeviled philosophers, theologians and scientists from antiquity to Einstein. The Greeks in particular seemed to have had a fear of empty space and so they tried to rationalize away emptiness. Plato argued that by definition you can’t have “nothing” and Aristotle concluded that emptiness doesn’t exist because “Nature abhors a vacuum”. Over the ages the debate, the riddle has continued to perplex thinkers, spawn theories and raise even more questions.
It’s hard to wrap your mind around nothing. It’s hard to imagine the vastness of emptiness, to conceptualize “nothing” which is “something” that you can’t see, feel, hear or smell. Being in nothing isn’t easy either, just ask someone who is learning to meditate. Lately, however, I’m becoming more comfortable with nothingness. After years overflowing with busy-ness, I enjoy those special moments of nothing but being - those moments when “nothing” is important.
On a recent sunwashed afternoon, I sat by the Burlington waterfront taking in nothing. It was the day the enervating heat wave finally broke and under a crystalline blue sky the temperature was balmy and the humidity felt like, well, nothing. It was an exquisite day, one I wished I could bottle and label “Open in case of emergency after prolonged weather fatigue”.
While I sat basking in my perception of nothingness, mesmerized by the shimmering sunlight on the waves and the lazy transit of billowed white sails across the lake, my young companion looked at the scene and offered a different perspective. When summer comes to Vermont , he said, he can’t find any of his friends. They’re all out – busy hiking or boating, barbecuing and swimming, everyone doing something, intent on making the most of the fleeting summer season.
But while my young friend admitted he shared his peers’ action imperative, he said he also wished for more alone time, more emptiness in his schedule. The generational divide wasn’t as deep as I imagined. Together we sat by the lake at the end of a fishing pier, enjoying the expansive emptiness of the least populated lake in the country and the silent ripple of mountain lapping beyond mountain far across the lake. Together we savored that special moment of doing nothing – which is, after all, everything.
