Something, not Nothing

It is what it is my nephew Rob likes to say about almost everything.

Sine qua non I like to think about almost everything.

I’ve tossed both sayings up in the air over and over and can find no clear winner one way or the other, though sine qua non is my personal favorite.

It is what it is has real merit—the phrase is a real badge of acceptance. Whether a thing is good, bad, or ugly isn’t the metric for the examination of whether one should or shouldn’t return phone calls or email etc. Nor is it necessarily passive.

Sine qua non, literally “Without which, nothing” (Latin: acc. Websters). The nothingness of it satisfies that part of my brain which is too often performing the unnecessary activity of comparing something to nothing, helping free me to sit quietly in my favorite chair while looking out the window to watch the humming-bird hover around the lemon blossoms.

Rob and I may be coming at the same thing from slightly different, if not exactly parallel angles, one of us from one direction and one from another, to arrive at almost the same place. I prefer mine as it philosophically removes the competition.