Why Nothing Matters (Fiction)

In the beginning, nothing was everywhere existent except for a minute corner of the infinite void, where everything was waiting to expand. This material genesis occurred when that tiny corner of everything, surrounded by the unimaginable extent of nothing, achieved the critical temperature necessary to fuel expanding everything into nothing. As everything expanded the nothingness receded.

Entering the teaching profession at the tender age of twenty-one, I lacked both the maturity and wisdom necessary to understand the study of nothing. Limited by fears and apprehensions, I deflected my students' repeated requests to do nothing in my class into personal attacks on me. I greeted their intellectual thirsts with a series of progressively drier lectures on something. Withdrawing into details gave me the armor that a journey into nothing would have stripped away. Five years of teaching would pass before I gained the confidence to risk everything to achieve nothing. Eventually, "DO Nothing Well" became the maxim that would direct my career.

My "real" teaching began in the sixth year of my employment. The preceding summer a group of students and I devoted much time and effort into developing a rigorous curriculum stressing the depth of nothing. As September approached our enthusiasm surged, we simply yearned to do nothing. Phase I called for a philosophical search for the essence of nothing. Like the ancient Greek philosophers the class split into two distinctive groups. One group argued: "that the limits inherent in the human mind made the comprehension of nothing impossible." The opposing group countered: "that we could find something of nothing in everything."

These two world views set the stage for a yearlong academic battle. The first group adopted the position: "that nothing by itself was important and the pursuit of its absolute meaning would lead to something short of nothing." The other side rebutted by claiming: "the pursuit of nothing needed something to fall back on or we would end with less than nothing" This clear split required the delineation of a carefully produced course of study.

Engrossed in preparing the plans to study many disciplines, we failed to take note of the school board's decision to examine our program. While we set up study groups, fiscal conservatives lobbied the board to cut wasteful spending. Epistemology, ethics, ontology, cosmology and logic became the locus

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