Nothing

I haven’t had very much time to write anything lately with several trips to my late aunt’s house with family coming from all over to get items out of the house before it is put up for sale.  It has been a long process of clean up and now we are getting closer to a final outcome for that house.  There is still another lake house full of stuff that we will need to deal with shortly.  

I had a few minutes early this morning where I was trying to sit and write for awhile but nothing came into my mind.  Usually on Sunday mornings when I lived in Alaska I would head out early for breakfast with friends but those are just memories of the fun times at Village Inn over the years.  I figured I could sit and work on several writing projects that I am working on (my lifelong friend Johnny has Alzheimer’s and wants me to write about our many scuba and skydiving adventures in our youth to help him remember) or post a few things in one of the forums I frequent.  Several days ago was thinking of all the things I could write about that we did together but did not have the time to start or jot down a few notes as reminders and now in my early morning fog before the coffee kicks in there is a void in my mind.

It did not immediately occur to me to work on this blog so I sat staring into this blank sheet with nothing in mind.  It became clear that nothing would be the mental exercise of the day.  Normally trying to write about nothing occurs in an essay, usually one with a word requirement that you need to fill for some reason or another.  It’s a little different than writers block but here I will attempt to rationalize that nothing doesn’t exist and is a moot concept (I’m off on a tangent thought process now).

The concept of nothing as a ‘normal mind’ comprehends it is a room, maybe a box, which is void of things, hence “no things” but that, of course isn’t true?  Thousands even millions of molecules, electrons, protons etc. fill this space.  So if we move into outer space, where we can have a box that is entirely filled with no “things”, void of anything.  Still however there is something in this box.  There is space.  There is an area within this space that can be defined as a volume.  Therefore something is in the box even in the void.

So ruling out the fact that “nothing” can reasonably occupy no space, can we conclude that anything with no area, space, volume, mass etc. is nothing?  Well, in fact, no we cannot.  By describing nothing, that nothing becomes a ‘thing’, it has an attribute of nothingness attached to it, which is a thing unto itself.  When we call something nothing, it becomes the opposite of that, it becomes something that we can talk about and theorize about, and is indeed something.

By using the term nothing, we have to call something nothing. “O, that’s nothing…” or “I’m doing nothing,” are completely senseless.  Nothing is something.  Therefore, I vote that nothing be cast out of use.  Nothing simply does not exist in my mind anymore because once someone says anything or something about nothing it becomes a “thing”, maybe not tangible in that sense but still something, does that make sense to you?  

It’s complicated and my mind is about to explode.  I need to get my coffee before I become the void I was trying to write about.

Ice