The above is a quote from a Monty Python comedic skit which by the very nature of the show was meant to be funny, sarcastic, irreverent, yet, sometimes philosophically intriguing.
With the Holiday Season upon us, the giving and the receiving have a way of making us reflect on so many things that make us ponder what it is like to have everything or, at least, for everything to go just right. Do we have enough in our budget to get everything we've ever wanted to give to those close and dear to us in the spirit of giving. On the other hand, some of us are really thinking, "Will I get everything that is on my wish list this year"?
Then there is a tiny, tiny fraction of the populace seeking what to give to someone who has everything. That might seem like a no-brainer to anyone who is not tasked with that chore, but there are a handful, perhaps, who would spend time worrying what to give someone with everything.
What could Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, for example, ever want as a present on the 25th of this month? Nothing, if what we are talking about is what money can buy. However, Warren Buffet may want a newer home, newer than what he had owned and lived in over the last fifty years; maybe, a new car with a driver. Perhaps, his own MacDonald's if he insists to dine on a burger often. Each to his or her own. But what is common to these folks is that the concept of having everything is far from what most people think.
Let's ponder the quote below:
Lest we forget, during the same season we are talking about, there is a bigger slice of the world's population - even in the neighborhood near us or from far away places in the third world where everything hinges on just a little something. Anything just north of nothing is the closest these folks will ever get to something. Everything may simply mean having three meals in a day .. sometimes.
Let's read that quote again:
“We come from nothing, we are going back to nothing. In the end what have we lost? Nothing!”
Humor aside, some scientists take nothingness very seriously. A few even make a career of studying nothingness – from the nature of the vacuum to the vast emptiness of space that actually makes up the majority of our universe.
Empty space or nothingness is what defines the entire landscape of the known universe. Is it true then that the desire to have everything and clearly to abhor what is nothing is far from what the universe is conveying to us?
Here comes the philosophical side of the Monty Python quote. A slightly deeper dive but I promise to make it fun and worth the reader's while. I pledge to take us back to ground level - back to everything dear to us.
Matter – the stuff we can touch, see or smell – only makes up about 5% of the entire observable universe. Yes, the couch you sit in, the car you drive, your dog, your cat, your town, county, the moon, the planets, stars and entire galaxies all make up only 5% of the universe. Between here and the moon is a quarter of a million miles of empty space. The astronauts who went to and from the moon encountered nothing, except perhaps a few grains of interstellar dust. Between earth and the sun is 93 million miles and the distance between our sun to the nearest star had to be measured in light years to make the number manageable, i.e. 4.2 light years to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, if you were a light beam. Light will have covered in a year 59,000,000,000,000 miles through nothingness or else we will not see the rest of what's out there.
Our island galaxy, the Milky Way, is so large it will take light a hundred thousand years to cross it, yet it is an average size. Our next door neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, is much bigger and so far away that we see it today as it was a few million years ago –that’s how long it was for light to travel through nothing to get here. But we’re about to meet up with it in a few billion years. The two galaxies will merge as one after a high speed dance, like two ice skaters twirling and circling each other that will take millions of years to complete. The several hundred billion stars between the two galaxies are so distant from one another that even during and after the two galaxies become one none of the stars will collide with one another.
Nothingness seems to rule the cosmic real estate. However, scientists, astrophysicists and anyone who cares to think about these things are not happy with the 5% idea. It does not explain the structure of the universe. There is not enough in 5% to hold together galaxies and clusters of galaxies (don’t you know there are superclusters of galaxies?) that everything should have all flown away a long time ago like fine dust on a windy day. They don’t because something mysterious is holding everything together - an invisible glue.
Now scientists have the answer and they seem pretty adamant about it that they have come up with the numbers that total 100%. First, there is 5%. Then there is 27% that is made up of dark matter, and 68% dark energy. You can’t get any more exotic than this, I’m not trying to make this sound like differentiating between dark and regular chocolate but it is, as of today, a mathematically viable theory.
Dark matter supposedly holds together the shape of and the clustering of galaxies while dark energy is what is causing the universe to continue to expand and doing it at a higher rate than previously theorized. Mathematical viability notwithstanding, there is no solid proof of the existence of dark matter or dark energy. Proponents of the theory just “knows” they exist but they can’t even describe what either looks like or what exactly they are. We’re back to 5% that’s real and the rest theoretical at best, imaginary even if one suspends a little bit of his or her disbelief.
Let’s turn to human scale and anything smaller. Between us folks we demand and create a lot of space from each other. Take the average home. We fill it with a lot of stuff – just look around you – and even when we include ourselves, the dog and the cat and the aquarium at the corner, there is more space than stuff. We like the high vaulted ceiling, the second floor bedrooms that nobody goes up to, and if you add the attic, there’s more space still.
There is a reason for bringing this up because when we look at the very small, the amount of empty space is even more staggeringly lopsided against actual physical matter.
Take the stable building block of everything - the atom. It has a nucleus and electron(s) circling it. Scale up the atom to the size of an average covered football stadium. Make the nucleus the size of a basketball at centerfield and you’ll have an electron the size of a grape circling above at roof level. In between that basketball and the grape is empty space. We’re made of atoms and if within each atom is mostly empty space we could then very well be made more of nothing than something.
Now we see that whether in cosmological or human scale, space, the void, or nothingness pre-dominates. It might be facetious to take this position but it is a metaphor for much of everything around us.
If you believe in the Creator you accept that we were created from nothing and that we will ultimately go back to nothing, “from dust to dust…” If you are not a believer then you have some explaining to do as to where everything came from. Even if you embrace the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe you’d still have to look beyond what was there before it. Was there nothing before it? Then there is the question of what is really beyond the so-called horizon of the universe – what lies beyond the very edge. If we say that there is nothing beyond the horizon then we will have to admit that the nothingness that is out there has to be infinitely far larger than all of everything in the universe combined.
No matter which side of the debate you are in, nothing is everything and everything is nothing.
The expression, "You can't take it with you", is exactly about ending with nothing, dust to dust. In other words, everything we seem to obsess with, worry about, keep us up at night, many nights, before the 24th this month, are all in the interim, which is what defines each of our individual lives. An interim of time spent amassing, collecting and obsessing about stuff, which in the universal scale that interim we call life is about less than one nanosecond.
Therefore, the next time you order a burger, or a pizza at the mall while shopping, say that you want everything in it. And think nothing of dessert later.
However, keep in mind that the weight you may gain this Holiday season is a dream of roughly more than three quarters of the world's population. Gaining weight is really just a first world thing, where weight loss programs, exercise machines, appetite suppressants, surgeries even, etc. are a multi-billion dollar business.
On the other hand, weight gain is a mother's constant wish for her child or children in the interior of the Amazon rainforest, the plains of the Kalahari, the poorest sections of Bangladesh, and we can go on and on.
For this season, therefore, let us think nothing of getting everything.
I must end with this quote to cure all our fears during the Holidays:
“The bad news is nothing lasts forever,
The good news is nothing lasts forever.”
― J. Cole
Think for just a bit because that quote may answer everything you've always feared about having nothing.
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