Nothing

 

Nothing

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

When I was quite a little girl, around 8 (which equates to 16 today – children grow up as soon as you look away!) my favourite thing to do at school was ‘composition.’  I loved writing stories and one day I told my brother, five years older than me, that I could write about anything.

That was a foolish thing to say. He said, ‘Write about nothing.’ I was completely flummoxed, of course, and went away, which is probably what he wanted me to do. This was the boy who, forced to ‘play’ with me, tied me to a drain pipe by my plaits and left me. He was an odd person – even my parents said that he was ‘different’. I can’t remember who rescued me, probably my sister, who was fifteen years my senior.

I’ve often thought about that sentence, ‘Write about nothing’.

What is ‘nothing’?  It is an absence, a lack of existence, of no importance, a nobody. Sweet nothings are fanciful remarks, often flirtatious. When asked if something is amiss, we may answer, ‘Nothing’, but that is usually untrue. It simply means that we are not prepared to discuss the problem that troubles us, or perhaps we’re trying to avoid an argument, or unpleasantness.

A child complains, ‘I'm bored. I’ve got nothing to do,’ although he or she apparently has every device under the sun and shelves full of books. Children need to learn to cope with boredom and to realise that life is not a carousel of delight and entertainment. They have to rely on their own resources, to learn how to manage their time or they will grow into discontented adults.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

‘Write about nothing’ – these days, naturally, I do little else than write about nothing, or, at least, nothing in particular.