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Look at the title of this post. What is it? If you thought it was “nothing” then maybe you should rethink your answer. A blank space isn’t nothing, it’s a blank space. It is something.

I’ve been wanting to blog about this for a while because the subject is something that I’ve continuously thought about ever since I saw The Never Ending Story. If you’ve never seen the movie then you definitely should because the special effects are the best I’ve ever seen.

SARCASM

Regardless of how cheesy the visual aspects are, the movie has a great story line. The plot is centered on the idea of the “nothing”. In the movie the nothing is portrayed by this giant gust of wind. But wind isn’t nothing, wind is something. The dictionary defines nothing as not a single thing. So what does nothing look like? I first imagined nothing as an empty space that is clear, soundless, and shapeless. However, this is not nothing. If something is clear then it is still something because it can be defined. The space that nothing is in, that is if it can be contained, would have to have absolutely no atoms in it. Therefore, it cannot have oxygen, hydrogen, or anything else that is matter. I would like to think that somewhere there is nothing, but I feel as if it would be impossible.

If nothing doesn’t exist, then what existed before space? It’s hard to wrap my mind around the concept of a time before space existed. Space is so vastly large and ever-growing, but surely there was a time when space didn’t exist. So what existed before space? Could it be possible that nothing existed before space? If nothingness did exist before space, then how large would the nothingness be? I think if nothing did exist, then it would go on forever, which is even harder to image than nothingness existing in the first place. My entire life I have been surrounded by walls. There have always been boundaries and lines that kept me in a certain space. I’ve always lived in a state, which has borders, a country, which is surrounded by water and other countries, a planet that is contained in a galaxy, and so on. I’ve always been confined to a space, whether or not I’m aware of it. It is only natural for my brain to assume that what lies outside of any border is another place that has its own borders. Even when Truman from The Truman Show (also a brilliant movie) found out that there was a world outside of his world, he still had boundaries (in a physical sense, although his emotional boundaries had been lifted).

I thought that maybe after writing this post I would have a clearer understanding of what my thoughts are about nothingness, but I remain clueless. I’m still puzzled about the complexity of our universes. Ants live their entire lives building colonies and living in a world that they know little about. All they worry about is providing food for each other and building a strong ant hill, which is like their own tiny planet. They live unsuspecting of the world around them like they have for millions of years, and sometimes they meet an unfortunate fate under the shoe of a human, without ever knowing what a shoe even is. I fear that I am like an ant. I live my life never knowing what is truly out there, and one day I will meet my shoe, and die not knowing. I will never know if nothingness exists, I will always live a life in boundaries, and I will die oblivious.

That’s just something I have to come to terms with.

What are your thoughts? I would love to know other opinions on the subject!

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