zero to infinity

I've stumbled upon a beautiful writer, Lisa Brennan-Jobs (coincidentally, daughter of Steve Jobs).

"In my life, I am between landmarks" she writes, "after childhood, before a book, before marriage and children, all potential."

I, too, am immersed in this period, all potential. Like the moment when you're atop a swing, poised high above the ground, about to swoosh back to earth. The feeling is so universal and curious that imitators have popped up everywhere: roller coasters that pause before a plummet, doors in horror movies that take forever to open, blowing on dice before casting them on the table, closing our eyes before an impending kiss. We love to reproduce the feeling. It's not one of objective pleasure, because it is, by definition, neutral. Before the outcome is known, it is at once good and bad, yin and yang. It is Schrödinger's Cat. A moment of pure absence, not only of physical events but of intellectual knowledge, and emotional reaction. Besides, for the risk-averse like myself, the unknown might even carry a negative value.

For all these reasons, I am not sure what the allure is behind this moment. The most obvious answer, I think, is that we have a subconscious (irrational or otherwise) belief that the future is more likely to be good than bad. For the most part, I'd like to think the outcomes do tend to our favor. Projections of our futures, happily, mostly fall within the range of realistic expectation. But I'd like to offer another reason for our fascination. I think there is inherent value in this thing masquerading as pure emptiness. In math, we are taught that Positive and Negative add to zero. But in ancient folklore, we are taught that yin and yang is what the entire world is made of. It is not nothing, but everything. It blends what normally cannot co-exist together. We exhilarate in this rare symmetry. I fancy mathematicians secretly do too--there is undoubtedly a mundane history behind the symbol for infinity, but I prefer to look at it as two, perfectly symmetrical, zeros.

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