How to love nothing*

*... and embrace everything

I have something to confess: I love nothing.

Don’t panic! I swear I’m not a nihilist. When I say I love nothing, I’m not saying I don’t love anything. I’m actually saying the opposite: because I love nothing, I’m able to love everything.

If you haven’t bolted for the exit by now, then you’re probably curious about this nothing: What is it? What’s it good for? How do I find it? In this essay, I’d like to answer all of those questions, and more. Because I think you’re going to like nothing too.

Zero

I don’t know about you, but my life feels far too full. My head is full of problems, my ears full of noise, my space full of stuff. No matter what, it’s always something, isn’t it?

When things get too filled up, I usually begin to crave an emptying: to clear my head, take some space, cut out the noise. So I do a little spring cleaning, try some meditation, take a three-day weekend. Things quiet down temporarily, and then I’m back to the noise. Back to being filled up.

The problem is that if this emptying is only external, then it’s impermanent. The vacation ends, and I’m back to my normal neuroses. What I really seek is an internal emptying: a way to get back to a clean slate, no matter how full life gets.¹

That’s where nothing comes in—or, as I like to call it, zero.²

Zero is pure absence. This image isn’t zero, but it points at zero. Noticing what’s not here gets you closer.

Zero is pure absence. Although we can use words and images to point at it, it cannot be encapsulated in words or images. It cannot be sensed or conceived.³ But it can be intuited.

Zero has the characteristics of peace, boundlessness, and infinite potentiality. When we are connected to zero—what’s not there—then what is there, by comparison, becomes intensely vivid and beautiful.

Zero gives us a reset button to experience all things—even an ordinary dinner—fully.

For example, let’s say you go out to dinner. People rave about the food here, but because of your high expectations, you spend the whole meal comparing the food you’re eating to the food you expected. Sadly, actual food < expected food, so the evening is a net negative.

By contrast, what if you compared the food to zero—to pure absence? Now you’re comparing the actual food to the expected food. You’re subtracting by zero. So you experience the food exactly as it is.

In all likelihood, you’re gaining an intuitive sense of zero, but it still feels slippery, right? That’s to be expected—like I said, zero is nonconceptual, so it’s literally impossible to think about.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t find it. Let me share a couple of pointers to get there.

Silence

Each of us seeks silence, but some of us take it farther than others. In 1951, the composer John Cage sought silence so intensely that he went to Harvard University’s anechoic chamber—supposedly the most silent place in the world. What he found surprised him.

John Cage, in an anechoic chamber, discovered that absolute silence does not exist.

I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation … [I realized that] until I die there will be sounds.

Cage discovered something incredible: Absolute silence does not exist. There is always noise, no matter where we go or what we’re doing. This means that we never actually find silence out in the world. We seek silence.

This discovery inspired Cage’s composition 4’33”, which is both his most famous and his most misunderstood work. In 4’33”, the musicians and audience sit, for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, doing nothing.

People often describe 4’33” as a silent piece. It’s not. At the song’s premiere in Woodstock in 1952,

one could likely hear the sound of the breeze in the trees, rain pattering lightly on the rooftop, the chirping of crickets, a dog barking aimlessly somewhere in the distance, the sound of bodies shifting their weight on creaky pine benches, the sound of breath being drawn and being expired.⁴

If you’d like to hear something like they heard, then listen to the Berlin Philharmonic perform 4’33” with your speakers turned all the way up.

When I first heard 4’33”, I realized that I had never truly listened before. Sure, I had heard songs and (allegedly) I’d heard other people, but what I heard more or less matched what I expected to hear.

With 4’33”, it was different: I searched for silence, but I could not find it. In the absence of what I searched for, what was left was sound, just as it was.

And sound, just as it was, was perfect.

Silence—the absence of sound—is zero in sonic form. Remember when I said that zero couldn’t be conceptualized or sensed, but it could be intuited? The same goes for silence. Because it’s never in the world, it’s always with us. All we have to do is search for it.

Space

When I took my first film class in college, the professor explained how different camera lenses have different fields of view. To demonstrate, she put a normal and wide-angle photo side by side.

A wide-angle lens (at right) accentuates the space between things.

Seeing those photos was a mildly psychoactive experience for me. Oh my God, I thought. I never realized how much space is between things.

Space is generally something people look right through. Space is an absence; it’s where things we want aren’t. As such, it’s invisible at best and a problem at worst. (Whyyy does my phone have to be across the room? I just laid down!)

Yet space offers a remarkable ability to reset and expand our worldview. Don’t we all need some space to think, to clear our heads, to get into a good headspace? Paying attention to space, like paying attention to silence, gives us a precious opportunity to empty ourselves out and become fully present.

Glance at the photo above. Was your eye immediately drawn to the screen? Now, try noticing the negative space in the image. How does that perception differ?

For example, let’s say I’ve become glued to my screen. A glowing, distressing rectangle, inches from my face, has become my entire world. All is not lost! If I can take a single moment to notice the space all around me, I can become unstuck. The screen is still there, but so is the monstera plant to my left and the art print to my right. The source of my distraction instantly gets smaller, and my world instantly gets bigger.

What nothing is good for

To recap: zero, or nothing, is the absence of everything. It has many pointers (eg. silence, space), but can only be approached intuitively.

Now: What’s it good for?

We’ve already touched on some of its benefits:

• The peace: of an uncluttered room, a clear head, etc.

• Presence: while eating a meal, while at a concert

• A reset: after listening to silence or noticing space

The last benefit of zero, and my personal favorite, is its potentiality.

Zero is like a womb out of which all things are born.⁵ Our phrases even hint at this: a pregnant pause, virgin territory, ground zero, a blank slate.

Personally, being connected to zero makes me feel a crackle of creative and empathetic energy. In conversation, if I connect to zero (eg. by noticing the space around my partner or the silence in between their words), our interaction feels smoother and more in sync. Creatively, I’ve stopped rushing to fill works with secondhand ideas; instead, I wait, receptively, until original ideas are born.

Maybe you like zero, maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re confused. That’s an excellent place to be. Out of your confusion, I promise that wisdom will be born.

So try it out. Listen to silence. Notice the space between.

I can promise you one thing: It’s good for nothing.

1. This process of emptying resembles what the Christian mystics called kenosis: emptying out oneself in order to become receptive to the divine. These mystics took the via negativa (negative way) to the ineffable by defining what God was not. This process of negation shows up all over mystical traditions: in Mahayana Buddhism’s Heart Sutra, which claims “no eyes, no ears, no tongue, no body, no mind…” and in the Upanishadic phrase neti neti, which means “not this, not that.” Nothing, as it turns out, is quite something!

2. Why zero? Zero, unlike nothing, has fewer associations, so we’re less likely to project onto it. Also, the word zero has an interesting etymology. It comes from the Arabic ṣifr, which came from the Sanskrit śūnya. You may recognize śūnya from its usage in the phrase śūnyatā, which means emptiness.

3. Zero has given me new appreciation for 1 Corinthians 2:9-10, which reads: Eye has not seen, nor ear heard … [what] God has prepared for those who love Him. But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit.

4. For more, check out The Story Of 4'33" from NPR.

5. I could write a whole essay about metaphors of motherhood and wombness in relation to nothingness. Śūnya “comes from the root śū, which means “to swell” … like the womb of a pregnant woman.” (David Loy, Nonduality: In Buddhism and Beyond) Emptiness is described as the “womb of compassion” (Nagarjuna) and prajnaparamita (the wisdom that realizes emptiness) the “mother of Buddhas.” Lao-Tzu calls the Tao “the mother of all things.”