Nothing

Sometimes nothing is better than something. This is not meant as Orwellian newspeak in light of the current financial crisis with banks and governments trying to take more from us, rather, we do not always have to do something to make things better.

A joke. A man says to his friend, "Well, my unemployed son has started meditating." His friend replies, "Well at least that is better than sitting around doing nothing."

Of course, we cannot 'do nothing' as anything we do is doing something. We can only 'be' in order do be doing nothing.

Without nothing there would not be something. Objects exist only by virtue of the 'not object' that surrounds them. Without empty space no thing could exist, and this is expressed in Japanese as 'ma'. Japanese art values the 'ma' in paintings, the space between objects.

The concept of 'mu' in Japanese Zen (wu in Chinese) gives the idea of something other than true or false, a null or void, if you like. This gives the idea of something other than duality. And in Buddhism, there is the idea of 'tetralemma' (as opposed to dilemma) as a method to get us to look beyond black and white.

In Taoism, everything comes from and returns to the void: in other words creation is something arising from nothing.

The invention of the integer zero was a milestone in mathematics, something the Greeks had long struggled with as 'how could nothing be something?' was not possible in Aristotlean logic.

Nothing has a rich tradition, and the value of nothing cannot be overestimated. The next time you look to 'make things right' or 'do something', think about the value of nothing as well.