Zip! Zero! Nada! The absence of anything. Not a thing. No portion, no part. What could be simpler and more straightforward? Actually, it’s pretty complicated. Nothing is hardly nothing. In mathematics you taught that zero is nothing.
But as soon as you understand that concept, you find out that you can have less than nothing. So nothing must really be something, simply because it is greater than negative and less than positive. And forget about physics. Physicists, while attempting to calculate the mass of the universe, are determined to prove that nothing must really be something, since they can’t find enough something to add up to what they consider to be everything. Confusing? Illogical? Unreasonable? If you are not dumbfounded yet then you have grasped this concept better than I have. On the other hand, we can look at it from a radical’s point of view, who considers everything to be nothing, while many minimalists think that achieving nothing is everything. And, if you are the insolent type, nothing is sacred.
If you are religious, you believe that God created everything out of nothing. If you are a taxpayer, you are constantly amazed at the ability of politicians to create nothing out everything you have paid towards the government in the past year. Now let’s consider what goes on in your head. If you have nothing on your mind, you have no direct thoughts on one particular thing. If you have nothing in mind, you’re undecided and probably open to suggestion, and that is not bad. However, if you have nothing upstairs, that is not good at all, in fact, you probably do not understand a word that has been written, or that you are so confused that your head hurts and you have wished that you would have read nothing at all.
Folks who have nothing up their sleeves are honest. But if they have nothing in their pockets, they are broke. Although doing nothing can be quite relaxing, having nothing to do is very boring. And beware when someone offers you something for nothing. You will find that nothing can be very expensive. And when you buy something on finance, “nothing down” usually means a whole lot later.
So we will never truly no when someone says they did nothing whether they are telling the truth or not. Maybe it is better we leave that to your imagination. Next time you ask a kid what they did at school and they reply, “Nothing,” try and imagine them holding up the local 7-11 or maybe blowing up their chemistry lab, it might make life a bit more interesting. Exactly what is nothing, it certainly is something, and something is not nothing..
