Making Space
Space appears to be much in demand these days. I read recently that people anxious about climate change are concerned that too much of the newly appropriated federal infrastructure budget has been tagged not for the repairing of existing roads and bridges, but for laying new pavement to relieve crowding on America’s freeways. Yes, many highways and byways are congested, but at this stage of the game do we really want to be encouraging more car travel?
Roads already take up a lot of space. So do swelling suburbs, sterile corporate farms, and pine plantations. In our relentless quest to develop and dominate the lion’s share of planet Earth’s terrain, we have effectively deprived myriad other creatures (including lions) of an environment in which they may thrive. Habitat loss is one of, if not the primary contributor to the decline and ultimate disappearance of an ever-increasing portion of the world’s non-domesticated animals. Clearly, these beleaguered beings need space more than we do, as the late biologist E.O. Wilson and others have forcefully argued.
Lack of space can become a deeply personal issue as well. There is, of course, the physical space each of us occupies. The average square footage of homes built today is almost twice what it was in 1973, even as families have shrunk. Nevertheless, “clutter” has become a problem cited by many homeowners, and more of them than ever are renting storage units to handle the overflow. It’s a uniquely American phenomenon, which the comedian George Carlin skillfully satirized in his now-classic standup routine, “Stuff”.
My wife, Trina, and I have been making a game effort to keep our own stuff under control. We reduced the acquisition of household items some time ago, and we conduct a yearly inventory of our closets and always fill a bag or two with useable items for donation (according to Harper’s three-quarters of Americans admit their closets contain clothes they will never wear again). Moreover, having acquired a rather formidable library during my academic and professional career, I’ve initiated the painful (for a bibliophile) process of stripping the shelves of volumes whose usefulness has clearly expired. These I donate, rather than sell, to a locally-owned used bookstore hoping it will help their bottom line.
Our thirty-something son, Kyle, is something of an inspiration for us in this regard. He owns a nice century-old two-story home that he shares with his cat. He could easily fill the rooms with furniture, the kitchen with appliances, and closets with a wider assortment of clothing, but he doesn’t. In fact, the upstairs is practically empty and when we visit he retrieves a folding chair or two from the basement for our convenience. A dedicated minimalist, Kyle prefers a spacious environment to one dominated by inanimate objects.
And then there is the matter of mental space. I had thought that in retirement I’d experience more of it, since I no longer had so many names, appointments, and obligations to remember. Each week, my brain would reel with the information and insights I planned to incorporate in the upcoming sermon, or the newsletter essay that was due. But while that weight has been lifted, I still can’t seem to find a way around or through the clutter and into the empty space my psyche craves. It occurs to me that part of problem is cultural, and that I am hardly alone in my frustration.
In his book The End of Absence, Canadian writer Michael Harris observes that, “The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished.” Like MIT’s Sherry Turkle and other commentators on today’s digital multiverse, Harris warns that the latter has become so enticing that loosening its grip on our attention has become increasingly difficult. “As we embrace technology’s gifts,” he writes,
we don’t notice that the gaps in our schedule have disappeared because we’re too busy delighting in the amusements that fill them. We forget the games that childhood boredom forged because boredom has been outlawed.
A whole lot of people these days feel they have to stay plugged in every waking minute lest they miss something. Each year, pedestrians who couldn’t take their eyes off their cell phone are run over, sometimes by a similarly hypnotized driver. As the recently deceased Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn observed:
Many of us leave our windows open all the time, allowing the sights and sounds of the world to invade us, penetrate us, and expose our troubled selves….Don’t you want to close your windows? Are you afraid of solitude - the emptiness you may find when you face yourself alone?
I have maintained a meditation practice for many years, and it does help. Acquaintances who have spent a week in silent retreat extol the spaciousness and equanimity it delivers. That’s not an option for me, so its more a not-so-simple matter of resisting the pull of the cell phone, the text messages, and the twenty-four hour news cycle for at least a short while each day. “If we start giving them a chance,” Michael Harris promises, “moments of absence reappear, and we can pick them up if we like”. But first we have to come to terms with what we’ve already lost.
