When my granddaughter ambles into my room and I am busy doing something, I tell her, "If you have nothing to do, don’t do it here." Probably I forgot that nothing is everything that everything is not.
And then there is another one prompted by the novel coronavirus: "Nothing is in our hands but we still need to wash them."
Come to think of it, what is doing nothing? When I am doing something, I am doing, well, something. For example, when I sit quietly, that’s what I am doing. Same when I think. But how to do nothing? How is it possible to do nothing? Probably the most difficult thing on earth!
So, what is nothing? The scriptures say the universe is made of five elements — khshiti, ap, marut, tejah and byom. The first four are solids, liquids, gases and energy, in that order. The fifth, byom, is space, probably meaning outer space which is, mind you, nothing, because it is empty — there is no gas even. And since this space is much bigger than the other elements put together, nothing is way larger than everything.
To take the definition of nothing further, there is a Sanskrit shloka (remember the beginning of old-time TV serial Bharat Ek Khoj in Hindi, kuchh bhi nahi thaa) which says that in the beginning there was nothing. That is a mind-boggling definition of nothing. Some may refer to it as the pre-Big Bang moment when the present state of the universe is surmised to have started.
Now, on earth, it is difficult to get that, I mean, absence of everything, which is technically called vacuum. They say nature abhors vacuum and we know that lots of gadgets are required to achieve it. So nothing is costly to obtain and maintain.
Then there is the thought about positive and negative. Which is better, by the way? You would say, positive no doubt. But wait, would you like to be declared positive for coronavirus? Anyway, I come to the point. What is there in between positive and negative? Nothing. But talking of numbers, there is zero, which we Indians translate as shunya, which again is nothing. And we are very proud of having contributed "nothing" to the world of mathematics. Now imagine the power of this nothing. Just go on adding nothings — zeros to any number and it becomes bigger than any imagination. That is what googol is, a number equal to 10 to the 100th power, or colloquially, an unfathomable number. Googol was coined in the 1930s and is attributed to the nine-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. The term google itself is a creative spelling of googol.
Sometimes, I find that things are not going my way and change is necessary. It is likely that everybody feels like that at times. But to my dismay, I find that despite all my effort nothing has changed. What was that? Could nothing change? Would nothing remain nothing if it changed? Well, well!
Coming to sports, most games and matches start with nothing (zero-zero) and some could end too with nothing (guess which those games could be). Tennis deserves a special mention, as it starts with a declaration "love all", which could be quite endearing, but really means nothing, zero-zero that is. I leave it to you to ponder if love really is nothing.
A part of meditation is clearing your mind of all thoughts and ideas, thus accomplishing nothing. And, like vacuum, this state is difficult to obtain and maintain. You may be wondering where I get all these ideas. I don’t mind telling you that when I go to bed and try to clear my mind of thoughts so I could fall asleep, ideas start pouring in.
Sure enough, they vanish soon, leaving nothing. Nothing comes from nothing. So I have to jot the ideas down soon after getting up, which is what I am just now doing. Do some of these ideas sound familiar, meaning is there any plagiarism? After all, nothing is always there waiting to be found out and many others might have discovered nothing.
But I know nothing about it. You may try to do a Google search for nothing and you will get, of course, nothing. And what do I achieve by writing about nothing?
Precisely, nothing.
