Hi, there. 👋
Let's examine this phrase:
it was nothing.
One magnificent, centuries-old paradox that everyone uses and nobody questions.
You've said it. I've said it. Your nan said it after knitting an impossibly intricate jumper for Christmas. We all say it, reflexively, automatically — like a social sneeze. Someone compliments us and out it comes, dressed smartly in the clothes of humility.
But hold on just a moment. 🍺
Let's Dive
Picture this:
A bloke on an ordinary street pulls a dame clean out of the path of a speeding car. Adrenaline. Chaos.
The sheer improbability of being exactly there at exactly that moment moving at exactly the right speed.
The dame, breathless and alive, turns to him — Thank you so very much! I'd be dead if you weren't there!
And he says: Oh, it was nothing.
Nothing.
He just casually dismissed a miracle as nothing. Which means, by his own accounting, one rung above nothing would be — what, exactly? Lifting a truck? Redirecting a free-falling Boeing 737?
"It was nothing" isn't humility. It's humility's diabolical twin wearing humility's coat. It's the most accidentally arrogant statement in the English language — because to call an extraordinary thing nothing implies the extraordinary is simply your baseline. Your factory setting.
Genuine humility, ironically, would sound far less humble:
Cheers, I'm rather chuffed my reflexes held up!
Translation: Yes, I'm really glad my reflexes kicked in.
⬆️ Grounded and accurate. And yet society would raise an eyebrow at that far quicker than cornflakes go soggy in milk.
Origin
So where did this all come from?
I might, with the utmost respect, raise an eyebrow in the direction of the 17th century.
Specifically, the Enlightenment — that grand, intoxicating liberation from the Church, from Scripture, from anything carrying even a faint whiff of the divine. The powdered wigs brigade, drunk on reason and terribly pleased with themselves, quietly retired certain words from polite vocabulary.
⬆️ "Miracle" being the first word shown the door.
Because "miracle" carries God. And God, in those newly liberated drawing rooms, was rather unfashionable. So when something genuinely miraculous occurred, the word was simply unavailable. Swapped out. Buried.
Replaced with nothing.
The supreme irony, of course, is that "nothing" turns out to be the most theologically loaded word they could've possibly chosen. Creation from nothing. Genesis. The very foundation of the Scripture they were fleeing — hiding inside the word they grabbed to escape it.
They ran from the Church and landed directly in the Bible. The cosmos, I suspect, found this absolutely hilarious. With its own... sense of comedy, of course.
Because indeed, when I think of it, we — well, I — can't create anything from nothing, mate. It's God's work. I can't suddenly, "Behold! That's xysjjals;! From... none!" Nope. I merely convolute anything I've been shown to, revealed, or taught. That's it. Mathematics, music, philosophy, et al are discoveries — continued by the rearrangement of each, and so on. They're already there.
Nikola Tesla didn't say,
Oh, I made the wave bounces around... from nothingness.
Hello. Alakazam thunder lightning proton.He noted the nature of it, from experiments of things which were already existed.
So, the Enlightenment lot thought they were building a new house entirely — turns out they were just redecorating.
Even my xysjjals; above ⬅️ I constructed it from an existing alphabet, existing keyboard, existing fingers.
🤔
Well... the Council of Nicaea lot sitting around curating Scripture like some sort of divine editorial board.
Right, this one stays, that one goes, nobody mention that bit.
⬆️ The political fingerprints are rather visible if you squint, are they not?
Yet, and this is the beautiful part, the essence survives intact despite all the human meddling. We were made. Something cares. The miracle is real. The cosmos is conscious of us in some fashion — something above is aware of us. That thread runs clean and unbroken through all of it — through every translation, every politically motivated edit, every powdered wig that tried to bury it under "nothing".
"You say miracle — we say nothing!"
"You say God — we say void!"
"You say divine — we say... also nothing, actually, still nothing, we're very committed to nothing!"
You can cover the sun with clouds, but you cannot put the sun out. ⬅️ Quite.
The cosmos. Watching. With the popcorn.
Miracle
So next time someone expresses their gratitude to you for something genuinely extraordinary — something that bent the ordinary rules of probability — perhaps consider the most actually humble response available:
You're welcome. It was indeed a miracle.
Stand in the truth of it. Let the moment be what it actually was.
It won't be nothing. It never was.
Thank you for your visit. All the best. 🎩
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