Zilch

No Thing

Hello Friends,

Today, I got nothing.

Usually after I press the publish button on the weekly Substack, I start thinking about the next one. I pull some topics out of the back of my brain or peruse my science newsletters and magazines, looking for a wave to catch and ride into shore on Thursday morning.

This week, nada.

Unless you count the really sad news about coral reefs reaching a die-off tipping point (sorry all you EV-hating, climate change deniers, this shit is real). So, it might just be too late to take scuba classes and see the pretty fish.

Or that protein powders have an inordinate amount of lead in them. No pain, no gain!

But I don’t want to talk about those things. I want to talk about nothing.

Take a pause for a moment and do a deep think into the concept of nothing. The complete and utter absence of anything.

There are some people, a pretty decent percentage of us, who can’t actually do this. They have no internal dialogue. There are no voices in their heads, no chatter, no self-judgment or criticism.

Just blissful silence.

As a fairly regular practitioner of TM (Transcendental Meditation), I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to accomplish this. And what I have learned is that it’s a real struggle (for me at least) to find nothing. And as soon as I get there, I’m like, “Look at me, nothing in my head…. awww.”

I can’t even hear nothing.

I have Tinnitus. I have experienced this condition for as long as I can remember, for as long as I have had ears, probably. Even when I was a little kid, and I wandered around in the woods, I could never hear nothing—never complete silence (besides the birds and woodland creatures). There has always been a cerebrally generated sound in my ears.

The really odd thing for me about this is that I can’t explain what my tinnitus sounds like. I’ve tried. I can’t tell you what note it is or whether it’s a single note or multi-tonal. I can’t even hum it.

So, ironically, I have no words for it—nothing.

Even if you go into the cold void of outer space, it’s not nothing.

Space has a smell—gunpowder. And of course, space has a temperature—it’s cold. Although, it’s not absolute zero, which is not nothing. Absolute zero has a value, depending on what units you want to give it: −273.15 °C, −459.67 °F, or 0 K (Kelvin).

Yep, we couldn’t deal with the concept of no heat. We had to give its own name: Kelvin. One does not have “no Kelvin.” One has specifically zero Kelvin.

Speaking of zero, it’s a fairly recent concept. It took humans like 200,000 years to come up with it, depending on who you believe.

Even in the beginning, zero was just a placeholder to tell the different between 10 ticks on a clay tablet and 100. Imagine how many years the human species had to deal with the fact that 9 was the largest number (take that, billionaires).

If Mary had a billion apples and Timmy had no apples, Timmy didn’t count (pun intended?). Hmmm…

And, like the Blues Traveler’s song Hook, “I’ve said nothing so far / And I can keep it up for as long as it takes.”

But I won’t. I will stop because I have nothing left to say.

Happy reading, happy writing, happy doing anything,

David