The Last Word On Nothing

HELEN: I’m thankful for all the new skills I’ve developed in the last 2.5 years. That’s how I’ve kept myself sane in pandemic times. And I’m using them – I’m trying to make a bunch of Christmas tree ornaments with my quilting and embroidery skills by the first weekend in December, for example, and I will be eating pizza (baking skills) tonight. This feels pretty underwhelming for a Thanksgiving post, but I’m the first one to write anything in here so now everything everybody else writes will sound better. You’re welcome, People of LWON! 

ANN:  Where to even start? Even though I’m still too cautious to go out much, I’m grateful to the people who keep inviting me; I think of them as superior beings looking kindly upon my trembly self, knowing that one day my baby steps will take me to their houses, to restaurants with them.  In fact, I’m grateful for the baby-steps phenomenon, the tiny slow easy things that do end up in a future I wouldn’t have thought I could handle.  

JANE: In no particular order: my air purifier, tater tots, karaoke, Lorde’s Solar Power, whoever invented bicycles, friends old and new, a body that can carry me the places I want to go, the sun, every person who has fought to make this world a slightly better place. 

RICHARD: Can we call this autumn, punningly, the Fall of the Autocrat? Bolsonaro, Putin, Musk, Trump. I admit, I’m writing this paragraph three days after the election, and, I also admit, I’m writing it while nursing a Longboard lager at a bar in Hawaii with a view of mountains and the ocean, but if the present fortuitous civilization-spanning circumstances (and I’m not referring to my current louche lifestyle) change between now and the day this post goes live, then I—  

No, wait. I was going to say, “Then I reserve the right to retract this post.” But actually, I don’t want to reserve that right. I hereby cede it. Because even if the immediate cultural/political vibe winds up changing for the worse in the next two weeks, I will treasure this memory. Right now, right here–6:32:47 PM HST November 11, 2022; 21.96139N, 159.34871W–is an intersection of time and space for which I am, and will remain, thankful.

SALLY: I’m grateful for nothing. I’m also grateful for lots of other things – the usual suspects like family and friends and keeping my health – but really this year I want to focus on how much I appreciate nothing. Nothing sounds like a pejorative – close conceptual relatives include nihilism and the abyss, and there was a time I bought into these associations. But then, in 2000, the physicist John Barrow published a PR book called The Book of Nothing, and it turned my brain all the way upside down.

The reason I say it was a PR manifesto is because Barrow made a spectacularly convincing case that ‘nothing’ is nothing to fear. It’s the unknowable beyond, existing outside the boundary of known anything-ness. It is the fruitful place from which every single something hails, not least of which the known universe. Also, not for nothing (see what I did there), we can’t actually conceive of nothing. Even if you zoom out into emptiest outer space, that’s still teeming with lines of force and it’s full of space-time continuum! So, not ‘nothing’. Keep trying to come up with definitions and metaphors. You will fail. ‘Nothing’ is literally outside our ability to describe. 

Which may be why nothing is the thing that drives us to fill it – with new knowledge, with words, with understanding. The unknown lurks persistently and maddeningly outside our ability to grasp it. Occasionally someone chips away at a little bit of the underground cave of known reality and expands us a tiny bit more into the vast expanse.

Before I read Barrow’s book, I was a graphic designer. After I read it, I grudgingly accepted I would need to become science-adjacent by any means possible. I soon found myself in the unenviable position of being an “older student” among a bunch of nonplussed undergrads in classes like linear algebra and basic-ass physics. It didn’t go very well. But I survived a deeply excruciating couple of years amongst the youths, one of whom accused me, at age 28, of working out a midlife crisis. (Jeez kid I hope not. If I could ever find a reason to want to live forever it would be so I could know how much of the unknown is only as yet unknown, and what’s just going to stay in the realm of nothing forever.) 

So, this Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for everything we can’t know, lurking out there driving us crazy. I’m equally grateful that we’re often too dumb and stubborn to accept that we can’t know it, and for the wild array of tools we come up with when pressed by our own ambition to understand – from measuring devices to neowords to equations to novel consequences of the previous. I hope we can train all of these xx on the project of healing the huge rift that has opened up between so many of us, which is made up of all the things we think we know, but actually don’t. 

JENNY: I am ever so grateful to this little group of LWON scribes for letting me take a long-tailed hiatus to write a book about dogs that I really wish I could hurry up and finish. I look forward to stretching back out in this space sometime in 2023! Woof!

CHRISTIE: Looking back on what I wrote here in 2013, I find that those words are still a fine description of what I feel:

Thanksgiving is the only holiday I truly love. I like that its rituals center around the harvest’s bounty and carefully prepared sustenance, and that it involves no cheesy Hallmark cards, plastic decorations or obligatory gift-giving. But most of all, I love that Thanksgiving is a celebration of gratitude, a most beautiful, life-affirming emotion.

Thankfulness is a marvelous feeling, even when it’s directed at an uncaring universe. Gratitude is a ritual for embracing life’s joys. It’s a declaration of meaning in a world that doesn’t care. There’s so little I can do about the injustices I see so often in my work, but I can choose to relish life’s beauty too. This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for family and friends who’ve given me a home in this vast, beautiful, indifferent universe.

EMILY: I’m grateful I got to go to Memphis for the Science Writers conference in October and see/meet some of the fine people on this thread – Jane! Cameron! Cassie! Becky! And so many other writers! It was incredible to bump into people I admire and see their actual faces. And their shoes. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed knowing whether someone is more into boots or flats or sneakers, if they carry a backpack or purse or tote – all the little mundane details we don’t see over the internet. I am so grateful to the many people who worked to keep the science writing community connected during the pandemic. You all kept me going. Thank you. 

CAMERON: Ditto! It felt amazingly special to be together in person. Grateful for seeing old friends and meeting new ones this year – it’s been a rollercoaster, and it’s been fun to scream and shout alongside you, and to hold your hands as we plummet and soar together.

BECKY: I’m grateful for pine trees covered in snow; black bears; Jupiter; the feeling of seeing a first quarter moon at sunset; Star Wars storytelling in the modern era; airplane travel; the way packaged food tastes on a backpacking trip; dogs; tea that is just the right temperature and strength; and ripe peaches. I’m grateful for Taylor Swift’s 30s. For Dave Matthews never getting old. For modern medicine and its ability to protect my loved ones. For Slack, especially a couple specific groups. For writers I admire who have also become good friends. I’m grateful for my house, and for being able to leave it from time to time. I’m grateful for outside clothes. For being able to choose boots and my favorite travel bag for the ScienceWriters meeting, and for sitting next to Emily while wearing them. I am grateful for my children. And for the stars outside my bedroom window, which are the last thing I see each night, after I tuck in my children and finally feel like I can sleep, knowing both of them are safe, and here. 

KATE: Thanksgiving is, hands down, my least favorite day of the year. I hate it for reasons both political (the whitewashing of violent colonialism) and personal (it’s a trauma anniversary). But not even my fear and loathing of this holiday could keep me from feeling grateful.

This year has been a very difficult one. At times I didn’t know if I’d survive it. I have [so far! There’s still a month left!], for two big reasons. Two immense reasons to be grateful. 

The bivalent COVID-19 booster effectively sent my long covid into remission. There’s a small but growing body of evidence that boosters may mitigate symptoms in something like 30-40% of people with long covid. I knew about this research before I got my shot and tried very hard not to get my hopes up, and I must have succeeded, because the sudden dissipation of my severe illness came as a huge surprise. Recovery is still ongoing, but I already feel a million times better than I did this summer. I am not a doctor and can’t tell anyone what’s right for them, medically, but if you’ve got long covid and can get the booster, please, please, please look into it.

Support from my loved ones carried me the rest of the way. I could go on about this for a long time, but there’s really only one thing I need to say. Dear ones, if you’re reading this, thank you.

CRAIG: A list of personal thanks is too long for here, the fact of breathing, the early mornings, late nights, and middle of days that I get to sit with words and ideas, and the front door that opens onto canyons and big skies. I am thankful for my two teenagers treading this planet, and for walks with my wife, hearing her erupt into glee at each beautiful thing she finds. I camped with her and my folks last weekend, braving an icy, high desert wind. My folks are entering their late 70s and we scrambled and crawled through cracks in boulders while we were out, so I’m appreciating that, too, their health and dexterity, their love for traipsing in the same places where my feet like to go. In the boulders, red blocks the size of houses, we passed through petroglyphs dating back thousands of years. These, too, fill me with gratitude, the company of history in all directions through many languages and eras. I am thankful, in advance, for a future where there is room to seek amends, a reconciliation with those who descended from the makers of these petroglyphs, a time when repairs can be made and we can heal traumas both inflicted and received. Here’s to that future.

“Give us the strength, give us the wisdom, and give us tomorrow.” – Robbie Robertson

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Photos: Blue mural embroidery by © Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons; sky with personage by Craig himself