I Give You Permission to Read This 

RilalyLeave a comment

“We have two choices in our culture today,” the “theys” who appear on our devices tell us. “We can either feel guilty about doing what we do, or we can give ourselves permission to do them.” The only asterisk in this Faustian Dilemma is celebrital dispensation. Similar to Papal Dispensation, if a celebrity says, or more importantly wears, something on the red carpet, it gives us commoners the permission to be who we are, “who we really are.” To listen to the theys of celebrity adoration, celebrital dispensation is far more powerful than Papal Dispensation in that it doesn’t just offer a specific relaxation of rules in one particular case, it offers us a wholesale abrogation of rules of social decorum, social contracts, moral and ethical principles, and presumably constitutions and foundational documents. The theoretical extension of the rules and policies of celebrital dispensation are not clear, but from what the theys suggest, a song lyric, a line in a movie or show, and any dietary decision celebrities bestow upon us can lead us to the brink of a guilt-free life.

In order for the celebrital dispensation to have power, however, we have to violate a special tenet permission-oriented types have embedded in their personal constitution: Thou shalt not grant another power over one’s life. Aren’t we all supposed to be self-empowered? Aren’t we all supposed to say, “I’m not going to give you that power over me.” Isn’t it all about autonomy, independence and strength to achieve comfort? It depends, and it’s conditional. If the celebrity is hot, superficially and/or professionally, they don’t just wield power in Billboard or the box office, they can influence our daily lives. 

Is this all a collective wink-and-a-nod joke, I missed, or does the woman I see twerking on stage in a corseted bodysuit draped with strands of silver fabric, over-the-knee fringe boots wield as much power over her congregation as the Pope does his? How many successful albums, movies, and TV shows does a person have to have before they can start granting us permission on how to live our lives, and what happens if her next album doesn’t fare as well? Does her sway over the culture ebb and flow with sales, and do we need to keep a ledger on how much power a celebrity wields, before giving them permission to give us permission? How beautiful, handsome, funny, or serious do they have to be before they’re allowed to grant us permission to put a little cheese on our broccoli before eating it? What happens when they eventually age out of their beauty and/or handsomeness, do they grant us permission to age, or do their powers diminish? It probably depends on how gracefully they age. Is there a bottom line qualifier they must continually meet before we continue to grant them ourselves permission to grant them permission to grant us permission to do what we want to do?

***

“So, you don’t just do something or avoid doing it?” is a question I ask of those who seek and grant permission to themselves. “So, you don’t just do something or avoid doing it?” is a question I ask of those who seek and grant permission to themselves. “You add the extra step of asking yourself permission first before doing it?” If that’s the case, the logical conclusion is that there’s another part of us that grants permission. Is that other part of us ruling in a fair, objective, and unbiased manner? Are all of our rulings always reached with our best interests in mind? If you commit to a regular practice of asking yourself permission to do things, how often do you say no? Has your rejection ever surprised you? If so, how did you react? Did you disagree with the basis of your judgement so much that it frustrated you, because you thought you didn’t consider some of the mitigating factors in your request? Did you ever end up eating that piece of chocolate cake regardless of the judgment? We’ve all been subject to unfair, foul, and draconian rulings from the various authority figures in our lives, and we’ve all rebelled against them accordingly. Have you ever eaten that piece of chocolate cake regardless if permission was granted or not, and how did that affect your relationship with yourself going forward? Have you ever stopped asking yourself permission for a time and just did it, because you began to believe that you could be a bit of a tyrant at times, and do you adjust some of your behaviors in the hopes that you might notice a run of good behavior that deserved some reward? You know you’ve been good, but have you had this feeling that you didn’t notice it, and you feel that you should start rewarding yourself with some chocolate cake here and there, until you start acting up again?”  

One definition of giving yourself permission involves the practice of allowing “You to disconnect WHO you are from your opinions, ideas and practices. Instead, placing that identity in your values. As long as you are acting in line with your core values, it opens up space to be wrong about decisions in the past, and how you will choose to translate your values in the future, without losing sight of your personal integrity or ability to be 100% whole and worthy.” 

If I ever fall prey to this nonsense, I know my first series of layoffs will involve middle management, as I will know, without poring through the numbers, that I’m probably overstaffed.  

***  

“I have so earned this,” we say as we lower onto a piece of soft and juicy chocolate cake, “and I deserve a reward.” Is a piece of chocolate cake ever that rewarding? How long does that sense of reward last? Do we go for another piece to reward ourselves more when we’ve been especially good? No, because that might prove punishing. The single piece of chocolate cake represents a reward at the end of the maze of good and healthy living, and we always announce our path to it? “I’ve been good.” 

I guess I’m a stranger in a strange land, because I just eat the piece of chocolate cake, or I don’t. I make decisions without disconnecting WHO I am from my opinions, ideas and practices. There are no trumpets in my land, signaling a dietary path that has been a quality one up to this point, or one that is so bad that I don’t dare approach the bench. 

We let our trumpets blare, because we want external validation and societal validation. Somewhere along the way, we glommed onto the complicated world of self-acceptance and self-actualization, and the rise of self-help literature, social media, and mental health awareness tangled and mangled this into people talking about their personal struggles and growth journeys, until we started seeking permission and granting it to ourselves based on past and present behaviors. 

“I am refraining from eating that piece of soft and juicy chocolate, because I’m on a diet.” We say this even though no one brought it up, and some part of us knows that no one cares, one way or another, but we want someone else to validate our discipline. Even a lifted eyebrow will do. Eating that single piece of soft and juicy chocolate cake gives us a naughty violation to punctuate the streak of good and healthy living that no one cared about when it went live. These are all decisions and choices we make, and they’re all fine, but how many times have we gone a solid month without a slice of chocolate cake? “Yeah, I deserve a reward for that.” What’s the difference between deserve and earn? Who cares, let me have cake. 

When we involve ourselves in the idea of granting permission to ourselves, I think there’s a super-secret part of us that kind of misses having a controlling authority in our lives. “I can’t wait until I’m an adult,” kids often say, “because I’ll then get to finally do everything I want to do.” We all know that there is a psychological push and pull to authority in our youth, as we push back on authoritative constraints, until they’re not there. When they’re not there, we feel the need for borders and guidance in a strange way that makes us feel uncomfortable. We didn’t miss it in our 20s, because we were all about luxuriating in the newfound powers of freedom of adulthood that can feel so fresh and liberating. When we hit our 30s, the idea of freedom became more established, routine, and a little boring, and if we lived to our 40s, we became the powers that be. No one notices when the idea of unadulterated freedom begins to wear off, but we eventually start to take it for granted, and we begin to miss the rewards and punishments that flowed from authoritarian control, so we began establishing our own. 

The logical response to those who deserve a reward is do they ever punish themselves for bad living? Have you ever tried canned beets? If not, then you don’t truly know the extent of quality punishments. WebMD.com suggests that beets “Don’t just reduce inflammation, they also improve heart health. The nitrates in beets have been shown to reduce high blood pressure. Beets are also naturally low in cholesterol and fat, which makes them a good option for people concerned about heart disease or stroke.” Are beets a quality punishment we sentence we pass down for falling off track regarding good and healthy living? Why else would someone eat a beet? If someone told me that they granted themselves permission to eat a piece of chocolate cake, because “I deserve it,” I would ignore them as much as I ignore anyone who publicly grants themselves permission to do anything. If however, they added, “I just ate a whole can of those wet, slimy vegetables,” I might consider my own form of a one-time dispensation. 

“Did they have that purplish color that comes from betalain pigments?”

“Yes.”

“Today, I tell you,” I would say with a permissive wave of my hand, “that you shall enjoy paradise.”

I realize that granting ourselves permission to do what we want to do is not some kind of new-age novelty, as the research suggests this practice has gone through a long and winding road. As a young ‘un who received unprecedented freedoms, unprecedented among my peers, perhaps I went through the traditional push and pull relationship with authority prematurely, but I don’t understand the unnecessarily complicated, and very public, steps some people include in their decision-making process. I don’t understand the process of inventing an imaginary, controlling authority to adhere to, abide by, and rebel against. Perhaps, it has something to do with filling a void that nature forced me to fill so early on that I don’t understand others struggle with it. 

I also don’t understand turning to celebrities to grant us permission to do things, unless it’s an admission on our part that we don’t have the confidence necessary to fill that void, because we fear our rulings, on consequential, pressing matters, are not as objective as we previously thought. To fill that void, we turn to the uncommonly attractive types who attract fame and fortune for some kind of authority on the way to live. Yet, if we were to hold them to the same standard we hold ourselves, we’d find they’re just making it up as they go along too. They do look beautiful doing it though, and we cannot deny that, but does that give us permission to look beautiful while we’re doing it too? If that ever happens to, or for me, I hope someone will come along and explain to me what just happened.

“For the First Time in my Life, I’m Glad I’m Handicapped.”

RilalyLeave a comment

“I never thought I’d say this,” my uncle John whispered to his friend, “but for the first time in my life I’m glad I’m handicapped.” The joke was the conclusion of a “frustrating moment,” John’s experienced on his trip to Florida to see Simon & Garfunkel. 

As funny as the conclusion to John’s story was, I had a hard time laughing. I knew too many sad details of his life to just turn it off and laugh at some insensitive joke John made about condition. Even though John was laughing harder than the three of us, and his lifelong friend Jim Rhodus had tears in his eyes from laughter, I couldn’t just turn it all off, because I knew how much he suffered in life.

With his guidance, I learned not to feel sorry for him, because he said that often did him more harm than good, but when he told me that the first signs of his muscular degenerative disease appeared in high school I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. 

“It affected you in high school?” I asked.

“Kind of,” he said. “I fell a lot. When I ran, I fell. We thought I was just a big old klutz.”  

“That was what we called him, a klutz,” his older brother told me later. “He’d fall for no reason at all. He was the star guard on an undefeated, champion high school football team, and some of the times he’d just fall, in the open field, with no one else was around. It was so embarrassing that we just laughed about it. We developed jokes, like kids do, to avoid wondering if there might be a greater explanation of it. You don’t search for an explanation when you’re a kid. You just laugh and joke about it. We had no idea that his eyes bounced when he ran, and we had no idea that his clumsiness was an early warning sign of a muscular degenerative disease. You have no idea about stuff like that when you’re young. We didn’t even think about greater things. We just thought he was a klutz.”     

Over the course of the next forty years, this disease would gradually rob John of his muscular strength. He lost some of the functionality of his legs before he was thirty, and before he was forty, he began losing use of his arms and hands. Doctors guessed that if John hadn’t spent so much time in the gym, in high school and college, the degeneration could’ve been more rapid. The gradual degeneration was such that before he was sixty, he began to lose his throat muscles. It was difficult for him to speak, and even more difficult for us to hear him. When he inhaled and drew the full force of his lungs, he could muster something equivalent to a loud whisper.

One of the most difficult aspects of his handicap, he once told me, was kids. “Kids don’t understand. They’re scared, and when a kid sees me in the mall, or church, or somewhere they turn to their parents for an explanation. ‘What is wrong with him mommy?’ I’ve heard more than one kid whisper that to their mom. The parents don’t answer, not in front of me. They give me an apologetic look, and I want to scream ‘just tell them I’m handicapped’. Most adults don’t know this, or they don’t think about it at the time, but we handicapped people feel like more of a freak when you don’t answer. Refusing to answer in the moment only leads the child to being more confused, and that confusion can lead to greater confusion and fear. Whatever is going on inside the kid’s mind, the parents make it very difficult for me to talk to the child. It can be so frustrating that I some of the times I wonder if it’s all worth it.”  

It wasn’t the first time I heard him talk about death in a round about way. He talked about it often enough that by the time he did finally pass on, I considered him a soul at peace, and I never saw it that way before no matter how many times I’ve heard it. 

On another occasion, I told him of a family member who wished for death, so he could be with his wife again. “I told him that even if there is a heaven, my bet is we will all look down and think about how much life we wasted on Earth. We do not know if there’s an afterlife, but we know life has a beginning and an end, and that life is short.” 

“It’s true,” John said, “It’s all true, but some of the times it seems to take forever.”  

“What does?”

“Life.”

He did not say that in a profound manner, as if to wrap up his views on life as a handicapped person. He said it as he might the details of the St. Louis Cardinals game from the night before. He shut the game of solitaire game he was playing on the computer down after he said that, and we spoke of the plans we had for the evening. He didn’t intend that to be a room silencing, thought-provoking line, in other words, it was just something he said before saying something else.

It didn’t strike me how illustrative such a line was to him being a handicapped man, until he relayed the Simon & Garfunkel story to me. 

John asked me to accompany him on this trip to see Simon & Garfunkel in concert, but I just couldn’t see traveling halfway across the country to see two men sing. For John, it was a matter of life and death. He spent a lifetime listening to those two old men sing, and he feared he might die before he could ever see them again, or they would, or they would simply stop touring as a duo.

“If you can’t find anyone else to take you, I’ll go, but I want you to drain the swamp of possibilities before asking me again. That’s how badly I don’t want to go.”

Most from John’s generation grew up loving either The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Some loved Elvis Presley with equal levels of passion, and I’ve met more than a few who pledged allegiance to Johnny Cash, but for my uncle it was all about Simon & Garfunkel. He owned every single album they made together, and he owned most of their solo albums. He also traveled the country to see them sing in concert any time he could. He preferred to stay close to home, of course, but he always had that fatalistic belief that this particular tour might be his last opportunity to see them live, even though he already saw them perform live over a dozen times before. When he sorted through their list of tour dates of that year, he found that the closest they would appear on this particular tour was Florida, an eight-hour flight.  

Why anyone would love the quiet, calm stylings of Simon & Garfunkel this much was beyond me. I have nothing against Simon & Garfunkel. They wrote meaningful songs that my high school administrators used to inspire us during high school spirituals, and I’ve also heard them at a number of weddings and funerals. That’s where I heard Simon & Garfunkel most often growing up, so my associations with them probably hindered my ability to appreciate their craftsmanship. I honestly didn’t care about them one way or another, but my uncle adored their music.

As we age, we learn that there’s no use trying to explain why one person loves a certain type of music over another. The one thing I did needed him to explain was why he needed to see these particular men sing calm, contemplative songs live. What’s the point of watching calm and quiet artists take the stage to play quiet, calm music? I’ve never seen them live, but I can’t imagine they put on much of a show. If they do something that is can’t-miss, how does one show differ from another, and what’s the difference between seeing them live and listening to them on the stereo, or watching their live show on TV? They probably walk onto the stage with little fanfare, carrying a guitar and a bottle of water. 

My frame of reference for concerts is admittedly tainted. I was a teen in the 80’s when heavy metal acts put on shows that we now call arena acts. I’ve never been to a calm, quiet concert before, but I suspect that someone like Paul Simon doesn’t body surf over the audience while singing Bridge Over Troubled Water, and I suspect that their choreographers don’t employ KISS-style pyrotechnics during Here’s to You Mrs. Robinson. My guess is the two of them walk out from behind a curtain and sit in comfortable chairs to sing and play guitar for an hour or so. If they stand, is it more engaging? If they sit, is it more comforting? Do they engage in colorful banter between songs? They probably do, to give us our money’s worth. Garfunkel probably drops a humorous anecdote about Simon that everyone in the audience knows about, and Simon probably hits back with some comment about Garfunkel’s afro, and everyone laughs as they lead into The Boxer. If my Uncle John successfully convinced me to take him to this show, I’d probably miss that rapport, because I’d be asleep.

My guess is a Simon & Garfunkel tour is as low-cost as it gets. How many employees do they have to pay? Does their show require roadies? If they do, my guess is they could use a Volkswagen to transport their equipment from city to city.  

John didn’t care about any of that. In fact, he enjoyed spending hundreds of dollars for the flight, the hotel nights, the ticket price, and everything in between, and traveling for about sixteen hours to and fro to watch a couple of gown men sing calm, quiet songs to him for a couple hours. Even though he said he didn’t consider it a hassle, the idea of what he went through to see that particular Simon & Garfunkel show was at the forefront of his mind when a feller in the audience, near him, began singing along with Simon & Garfunkel. 

“That’s kind of the price you pay when you go to a live concert,” I told my uncle. 

“This guy was singing every song, word for word, and he was singing them at the top of his lungs,” my uncle replied. “Those of us who were near him could barely hear Simon & Garfunkel over him.”

“It’s true. The guy was all but screaming the lyrics,” Jim Rhodus said. Jim was John’s lifelong friend, and the one who eventually accompanied John to Florida. He was also in the room, enjoying John’s retelling. “We could all understand the guy getting swept up in the excitement of the first few songs, but it started to get a little obnoxious after a while.”  

“Yeah, when he continued doing this, what was it, four or five songs in? It was pretty obvious that this guy was going to continue to do it throughout the concert,” my uncle continued. “I just spent eight hours flying, ten total when you account for TSA and other delays, to see these two sing, and this guy was ruining everything for me and everyone around him. So, I finally just had it, and I yelled out, “Would you just shut up!” I was so frustrated that I think I dropped an ill-advised word in there somewhere.”

“And he heard you?” I asked without mentioning how surprising it was that anyone could hear my uncle, due to his condition, and the idea that he was so loud that anyone could hear him over the music was shocking, no matter how quiet and calm the music is. 

“Oh, he heard him,” Jim Rhodus said, starting in on his laughter, as John passed the three-quarter mark of the story.

“I guess I was so frustrated that I mustered more strength than I ever have,” John said, “but yeah, everyone between me and him heard me. This guy bolts out of his seat, as if he received an electric jolt, and he begins scanning the crowd in my general direction. As he stood, he just kept going and going. He had to be, at least, six-foot-five, but in my nightmares, he’s a seven-footer, and he was broad too. I couldn’t see much in the limited light in the audience, but his shadow made him appear 250 pounds of lean muscle. It was like the scene from a 1980’s comedy. So, this Ndamukong Suh-looking fella stands up and looks around for who said that, and he’s ticked off.”   

“Did he look at you?” 

“Not at first,” John said, “but everyone could see his intentions when he stood, and everyone between us gave me up pretty quick. They all turned around and looked at me, and this guy spots me, and the lighting was such that he was mostly in shadow, but I swear I could see flared nostrils. He continues to look at me silently for about five seconds, and then he sits down without saying a word. After I calmed down, which took a little while, I turned to Jim and said, “What did I say exactly?”

“You said,” Jim said. “I never thought I’d say this, but for the first time in my life I’m glad I’m handicapped.”     

The Mystery of the History of Zero

RilalyLeave a comment

Zero has always meant nothing to us. It lurks in the shadows of something. It’s a number, but it kind of isn’t in some confusing, “I don’t want to think that much” way. It has its own identity, and it doesn’t. It’s complicated, and it’s not. It’s an odd number, but it’s not odd. It’s not even even, but it is and it isn’t. We don’t consider it prime or composite. It’s not positive or negative, as it separates the negative from the positive. It’s a number but it also represents the absence of a number. It’s so confusing to us that we have to wonder if teachers should even teach its advanced concepts, and if they do, at what age? We were taught the basic facts of how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide zero, but when we reached advanced mathematical concepts, we learned that certain mathematical answers cannot be answered. They’re undefined, which led us to say, “What do you mean undefined? It’s zero.” At this point, the mathematician explains that if we try to divide twelve groups of people into zero groups, it cannot be done. It’s undefined. It’s complicated, and it’s not.
As Andreas Nieder writes in a 2016 paper, “For a brain that has evolved to process sensory stimuli (something), conceiving of empty sets (nothing) as a meaningful category requires high-level abstraction. It requires the ability to represent a concept beyond what is perceived.” 
“We’ve now reached a point in our history where we have to describe nothing,” someone, with some sort of twisted brilliance, said at various points in human history to try to advance the cause of what we now call zero. “How can we properly appreciate the concept of something, without a concrete grasp of nothing?”   “But there’s always something,” his counterpart probably argued. “Is there nothing in the vast expanse of a desert? There’s sand, over one septillion of tiny grains of sand, and how many molecules litter the water of the vast quantities of nothingness in the ocean? Even in the vast expanses of space, there’s always something.”  Zero is not substantial when compared to the other numbers, and it’s not tangible, but how many of our current creations, and measurements for those creations, would be almost inconceivable without it? It’s been there for so long now that we take it for granted. Yet, it went through a long, slow, debated, and debatable gestation cycle. Even in the relatively limited historical record of ancient civilizations, such as those in Babylon, India, and the Mayan civilization, zero, or some semblance of zero, appears. We don’t know why it made an appearance numerous times in different civilizations. Its birth remains a mystery to us, because its purpose wasn’t defined. They invented the concept of zero, but there is no evidence to suggest that they developed it in a substantial manner. As with most theories, they appear to have failed to apply the concept of it to real world constructs, but we have to give them credit for developing the theory of it. Bottom line, their theory was probably as difficult for them to grasp as it was to explain, because there’s always something. Even if we laid four avocados on the ground and then removed them, there would still be the millions of granules of dirt beneath it, trees, leaves, and the micro organisms that feed on them. There’s always something. Scholars believe zero began its life as something to fill columns when humans advanced their attempts to count. When those who invented, developed, and applied a method of counting, they encountered a void after nine. Their question, how do we get past nine, and all the other nines that lead to ninety-nine without something to carry us to the next number. How do we get to eleven, twenty-one, and one hundred and one? India’s positional numeral system needed a zero to scale past 9, and their trade demanded it. They needed a placeholder, or something to fill the void. They didn’t start counting numbers with zero, but they wrote a placeholder in the tens, the hundreds, and the thousands to fill columns when necessary.   
In a Scientific American article, Charles Seife, author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Viking, 2000), says “Filling columns is not a full zero. A full zero is a number on its own; it’s the average of –1 and 1.” “The Number Zero began to take shape as a number, rather than a punctuation mark between numbers, in India, in the fifth century A.D.,” says Robert Kaplan, author of The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford University Press, 2000). “It isn’t until then, and not even fully then, that zero gets full citizenship in the republic of numbers,” Kaplan says. Some cultures were slow to accept the idea of zero, which for many carried darkly magical connotations.   But Seife is not certain that even a placeholder zero was in use so early in history. “I’m not entirely convinced,” he says, “but it just shows it’s not a clear-cut answer.” He notes that the history of zero is too nebulous to clearly identify a lone progenitor. “In all the references I’ve read, there’s always kind of an assumption that zero is already there,” Seife says. “They’re delving into it a little bit and maybe explaining the properties of this number, but they never claim to say, ‘This is a concept that I’m bringing forth.’” Kaplan’s exploration of zero’s genesis turned up a similarly blurred web of discovery and improvement. “I think there’s no question that one can’t claim it had a single origin,” Kaplan says. “Wherever you’re going to get placeholder notation, it’s inevitable that you’re going to need some way to denote absence of a number.”
The Revolutionary, Ancient Indian Dot
So, if the Babylonians developed a placeholder (a wedge) by 300 BCE, not a “full zero.” India’s leap—likely pre-Brahmagupta, with the Bakhshali manuscript (3rd-7th century AD)—was making zero a standalone number, and the Maya did it too, independently, by the 4th century AD, we might suggest that there is a well-defined trail but no clear-cut discoverer, inventor, or even a well-defined point of origin, of the number zero, as it was always just kind of there, but its functionality wasn’t even as clear to early users as the functionality of negative numbers appears to have been. If it was always kind of been there, but rarely used as a number, how did zero make the leap as a concept?   Why did the powers of the zero contain “darkly magical connotations?” As with all cultures, modern and otherwise, the unknown is beyond current capabilities to explain, so we assigned mystical, dark, and forbidden connotations to explanations of what we otherwise cannot. With that in mind, why did someone brave the “here, there be dragons” designation to further the concept, and what was the reaction among their peers?  What twisted, weird, and just plain different theoretician(s) sat in a bathtub and dreamed up ways to further the concept of nothing and zero. If he eventually managed to successfully sway his peers to accept the premise of this proposed furtherance, how did he answer their “And then what?” questions. Okay, we’ll accept the premise of your newfound importance of a zero, but what do we do with it? Theory is one thing, application is quite another. How do you propose we use it? What purpose will it serve? When we’re building a house, diagramming a structure, or figuring out how to use water in our fields, what purpose does a concrete explanation of nothing serve? Your point of reaching a greater understanding of something through nothing is a provocative one for pointy-headed intellectuals to consider in their philosophy caves, but how do we apply it to real world concerns? In my uninformed and admittedly limited search, I found no timeline specifically breaking down a concretized life cycle of the zero. Various points on the timeline state that it was discovered here, mysteriously listed there, and it appeared here, there, and elsewhere in the historical timeline, but in terms of some form of functionality it mirrors the resume of the misspent life of a cousin who did nothing in life. He was always there, but he never did anything noteworthy. No one knows how it happened, nor can they answer the when, where or why questions, but he became the star of the family one day.  The most interesting elements to the timeline of the zero are not the who and when, though they are interesting, but the philosophical push of how zero made its way into the halls of Physics, Calculus, Engineering, Geometry, relativity and quantum mechanics, and a large part of finance and economics to, in many cases, eventually lead the way to numerous modern advancements in these areas.  If dealing with natural numbers, i.e. 1,2,3 …, is dealing with tangible things and events, the zero provided more of an abstract idea for mathematicians. This provided mathematicians greater freedom from real world constructs and representational qualities into high-level abstraction. The eventual inclusion of the properties of the number zero was such that the advancements of modern mathematics would not be possible without it. Imagine being a renowned “genius” in one of the fields listed above, and you have a problem that has plagued you for much of your life. This genius has put this problem to a group of peers and his students for decades, and no one can solve it. The genius eventually labels this problem unsolvable, a 0̷, or no solution, until some egghead walked up to him in the town square, while he sipped on his brew and said, “Try putting a zero on it.” The renowned expert probably sent this egghead away with a “Yeah, great, Montenegro, now go home to your flock of sheep and your basket weaving, and leave me alone.” Until, the expert went home, and they hell’d it, and put that zero into his mind-boggling equation. Did the genius use the zero to solve the problem, or did he approach it in a way that he never considered before? Was the genius’ problem of solving for something only solvable by introducing the concept of nothing? It’s impossible to know if a representation of nothing had an epiphany affect on any one person soon after it was incorporated into theoretical or actual problems, but we have to imagine that the effects and affects were cumulative until we finally arrived at a collective epiphany that led us to fully incorporate it over time.
A very brief and succinct description of our favorite number/non-number zero is that it flickered in ancient Babylon as a placeholder wedge by 300 BC, but India’s Bakhshali manuscript (3rd-7th century AD) and Brahmagupta’s 7th-century rules made it a real number. The Maya mirrored this leap by the 4th century, while Al-Khwarizmi carried it to the Islamic world in 825 AD. Europe, stubbornly resisted until Fibonacci’s 1202 Liber Abaci, finally caught on—linking India, the Middle East, and the West in a slow, vibrant chain. The research suggests that if Aryabhatta, Brahmagupta, Al-Khwarizmi, and Fibonacci, and the other brave souls hadn’t weathered the storms to bring zero to absolute indoctrination, the progress we know today, “the opening of the universe,” wouldn’t have been possible. Zero defines nothing and everything at the same time. It can be used as a point of origin, in positive and negative ways, and some suggest that those brave souls ended up furthering knowledge to advance Physics, Calculus, Engineering, Geometry, relativity and quantum mechanics, and a large part of finance and economics. The very idea that the “nothing is something and something is nothing” complex identity of zero ended up playing a starring role in science. In Calculus, for example, zero provides a tease of limits, where functions flirt with the abyss as values approach it. In relativity, zero-point energy keeps the universe buzzing even at absolute rest, and in binary code, 0 as “off” teams with 1’s “on” to whisper digital secrets to us. Mr. Zero, as we should now address his highness, or lowness, depending on how we choose to view him, transformed computers from clunky gear-spinners to sleek bit-flippers, while revolutionizing physics and engineering. Without zero, we might have to work with Roman numeral guesswork to form the precise calculations necessary to build bridges and figure out planetary orbits. If the geniuses listed here hadn’t developed a theoretical counterpoint to something, in these fields and others, we might have to leave such matters to vague speculation and our imaginations. Imagine that!  Zero is also one of the primary languages of the computer. We’ve all heard the phrase ones and zeroes. Zeroes are needed to create code and messages that the computer requires for functionality. If the properties of zero were never invented, discovered, and advanced, is it possible we wouldn’t have the knowledge or the technology necessary for the computer?   Even after everything it’s been through and everything it has accomplished for us, we still have no love for zero. The full zero, standing on it’s own, and the average between -1 and 1, represents absolute failure in the classroom, a complete condemnation of athletic ability on a scoreboard, and desperation when it appears alone in our bank accounts (zero involves some desperation, but not the total devastation the negative numbers create in our equations). We considered calling someone an absolute zero to be worst insult we could say about a person, until Billy Corgan came along and reminded us of its positive, negative and abstract qualities. We also thought we had a firm grasp on the traits of nothing, until the writers of Seinfeld redefined it and showed us how brilliant nothing could be. Now imagine going back to a time before zero to explain to the most brilliant minds in math and science how zero and its resulting revolutionary concepts have reshaped our world. “Achieving something is just as important in our time as it is yours,” we might say, “but the most brilliant minds of the civilizations, since your time, couldn’t have achieved half of what they did without fully developing and realizing the properties and possibilities of nothing.”