ON ZERO

How Nothing Shapes Everything

Zero. A symbol that means nothing, yet changed everything.

For centuries, the Greeks ignored it. The Romans dismissed it. To imagine “nothing” felt dangerous—like letting emptiness swallow order itself. But in India, zero was seen as fertile, even sacred. Nothing wasn’t absence. It was possibility. From there it spread—into mathematics, banking, technology, and the architecture of the modern world. All built on nothing.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about zero differently—not as a number, but as an experience.

I felt it when my father died, and the shape of my life changed overnight. I felt it in early sobriety, staring at mornings that stretched too wide and too empty. I’ve seen it in clients who step away from a career and say: I don’t know who I am without this work.

Zero unnerves us. The void, the pause, the space between identities—it feels unbearable. We rush to fill it with noise, consumption, achievement. Anything to avoid sitting with the truth of nothing.

But here’s the paradox: zero is where transformation begins.

In coaching, I’ve watched people try to avoid the emptiness that comes after letting go. They leave a job but immediately search for another. They pay off debt but instantly take on more. They reach a financial goal but can’t stop moving the horizon further away.

It’s not the next step that’s frightening. It’s the pause. The gap. The moment of zero.

And yet, it’s in that pause that something new can emerge. Zero is not a void. It’s a seed.

Our culture worships accumulation. More followers. More productivity. More growth. Zero feels like failure in a world addicted to more. But if we never face nothing, we never learn the art of beginning again.

Zero strips away illusions. It asks: Who are you without the numbers? Without the titles? Without the story you’ve been telling?

When we meet zero honestly, it can be terrifying. But it can also be liberating. Because nothing is not the end—it’s the start of everything that matters.

So perhaps the question is not how to avoid zero, but how to welcome it. How to find courage in the blank page, the quiet morning, the empty hand.

Because sometimes, the most powerful transformation begins not with something, but with nothing.

This is the heart of my work with clients—and a thread in The Conscious Currency. Learning not just how to accumulate, but how to sit with emptiness long enough for meaning to return.