What if nothing became as important as something?

When you travel the southwestern United States, you can see huge mesas rising above the ground. If you’re looking out towards the ocean, you’ll notice the boats. If you look in the sky, you’ll see clouds. How often do you consider the ground or the water or the sky as being just as important to the scene?

As humans, we’ve evolved to notice what stands out from the background (it helped us notice the predators moving behind the trees).

How can there be anything standing out if there’s no background? The truth is that the only way you know something’s there is to compare what it would be like to have nothing there.

The background goes with the foreground equally. That is, the background is just as important as the foreground. Silence within music is just as important as the notes themselves. The space between the words on a page is just as important as the words themselves. The number one has no real meaning without the number zero to balance it. Non-existence is as important to existence as existence itself. The empty set is part of every set.

Nothing is incredibly important, isn’t it?