It was already not a great morning.
My favorite pair of sunglasses simply fell apart on the way to my barber.
I’d made an online appointment the day before — or so I thought — for a 10 am haircut before doing a noon video podcast interview for the SGR Journal.
Instead, his shop was mysteriously closed.
Also, earlier in the week, our top candidate for Chief Technology Officer for our wellness app unexpectedly withdrew.
The final straw in my grooming / tech challenges, however, was that after a misclassification by an overzealous Amazon bot, all 49 reviews of my new book simply vanished.
Like drawing the “Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200” card in Monopoly, I was suddenly back to Promotional Level Zero.
Since the theme this month is Proof — Meditation HERE — this seemed the perfect moment to dive into the idea of negative proof.
There’s even a fun Latin phrase for it:
— argumentum ad ignorantiam —
Argument from Ignorance
When it’s a simple assertion — say, “there is no milk in the fridge” — negative proof works fairly well.
You just have to pull everything out of the fridge and voilà: you’ve made your case.
More often than not, however, such negative thinking leads to bad reasoning.
The absence of something doesn’t necessarily prove something else.
For example:
No one has proven ghosts don’t exist →
therefore ghosts must exist.
Note: I’m not taking a position here on the supernatural; I’m just saying that kind of proof wouldn’t ever hold up in court.
It’s so easy during life’s mid-marathon moments to default to the same kind of understandable but faulty logic:
“I don’t see results → it’s not working”
This tendency is especially strong during long timelines or when invisible processes are involved.
Midway through the marathon, there are often no clear markers of progress.
That starting line burst of enthusiasm has long evaporated.
The cheering crowds at the finish are nowhere in sight.
Everything feels stalled and ambiguous.
You may not even know how far you’ve come, and more significantly, how far you still have to go.
Like opening the oven and collapsing the soufflé — or digging up the seed to see if it’s sprouted — you’re forced to trust that the absence of any proof doesn’t mean progress isn’t real.
It just might be invisible.
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The phrase “Flash Sale” always gives me anxiety, so let’s just say that from now until it officially launches on Wednesday, I’m offering my own “Quiet Window” pricing.
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While the adage “A Watched Pot Never Boils” is annoyingly true, I’d also like to point out that
“The Unwatched Pot Tends to Boil Over.”
Even so, I admit to the wisdom of the original saying.
When you’re eager for a particular correspondence, compulsively refreshing your email certainly doesn’t speed up its arrival.
My terrace gardens taught me many things, but chief among them was that you had to trust that each process had its own timing, and that seeds will sprout if you sustained them properly.
That’s why I love this wry Billy Collins poem.
You can’t force proof — and certainly not by dissection.
Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Especially when it comes to deeper meaning, you have to let things reveal themselves.
In contrast, there are some instances where negative proof really does apply.
In science, for example, if something should produce evidence but doesn’t, that’s a meaningful signal.
If you designed a new drug to change people’s eye color and nothing happens, you’ve got all the proof you need.
It’s also true that in the law, the burden of proof really does matter.
(Fun Fact: Shadow of a Doubt was Hitchcock’s favorite of his films, and the one he had the most fun making.)
Even so, while a lack of evidence can lead to a verdict of “not guilty,” that’s not necessarily the same as “innocent.”
The classic metaphor often cited for invisible infrastructure is the Chinese bamboo tree.
For years — often as many as five — there’s no visible growth above ground.
During this time, the tree is building an extensive root system underground.
Then suddenly, in a short burst of just a few weeks, it can grow to 80–90 feet tall.
The key premise is that the absence of visible growth is actually part of the process.
Our astonishment only comes because that’s usually quite difficult for our proof-seeking minds to accept.
Not only do we have to be precise about what counts as evidence, we must also bear in mind how it’s interpreted.
Sometimes, I’ve even noticed that the evidence we most need fades from our view.
For years now, I’ve done a Sunday Week in Review exercise, just listing the major occurrences of the week.
Invariably, I start out thinking, “This will be easy; nothing much happened this week.”
Yet ten minutes later, I’m quietly astonished by just how much occurred, how many challenges were faced.
Perhaps that’s because processes often withhold visible proof from us.
Or they can be almost flirty — like the Amazon reviews, which reappeared online in clusters over the next few hours.
It’s particularly important — especially mid-marathon — not to equate the absence of evidence with failure.
I sincerely wish it were easier to waterski across the surface of a poem (or life) without demanding proof at every turn.
Or to misread moments of silence as quiet disasters.
Rather than arguing from ignorance, it’s wiser to go deeper in our definition of proof — especially when it’s invisible.
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