Taking Our Space

Space is essential in life just as space between logs is essential for fire. Space rekindles attraction between longtime partners. Taking space between tasks revives us. And giving our grown children space enables them to develop their own lives.

I don’t know about you, but for me this business of space is not easy. For example, not only do I live with my partner, he also Indie publishes most of my books. When you live and work with someone, space becomes a challenge. In her fabulous book, Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel uses the fire metaphor to write about space and attraction:

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery. Love likes to shrink the distance that exists between me and you, while desire is energized by it. If intimacy grows through repetition and familiarity, eroticism is numbed by repetition. It thrives on the mysterious, the novel, and the unexpected. Desire is less concerned with where it has already been than passionate about where it can still go. But too often, as couples settle into the comforts of love, they cease to fan the flame of desire. They forget that fire needs air.

The fire of ambition needs air as well. My To-Do List seems to get longer every day, no matter how quickly I run. I know I need down time, but where is it? What a joke to say I’m “retired,” especially when I’ll soon embark on a new book launch. My To Do List reminds me of the scene in Frog and Toad Together when the two friends sit on the stoop and watch Toad’s list blow down the street. “Aren’t you going to chase it?” asks Frog. “Chasing the list was not on the list,” says Toad, still seated. What a blessing. That night Toad remembers that going to sleep was on the list.

As for allowing my grown children the space to tend their own fires, won’t I always know best what they should be doing? After all, no matter their age, I have more life experience. For thoughts on that, I turn to Kahlil Gibran.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

Such an elegant way to say, “Back off. Give the kids some space.”

With so much wisdom to draw from, this business of creating space should be easy, shouldn’t it?

I wish.

Now that I’m in my seventies, you’d think I would have serenity down pat. And you’d think that serenity would mean giving everybody, myself included, some space. I’m not quite there. Though to be fair, I’m better at it than I was five years ago.

Until we sold our big house in April, my partner and I worked on different floors and often didn’t see each other for much of the day. I do take breaks from my To Do List to go for a walk when my smart watch reminds me. And I don’t chase my children as much as I did; I’m better about letting them come to me (claims the woman who just moved to Oregon to be near one of the kids).

Taking Our Space Back

What’s the next step? Perhaps some space from my own anxieties. If you’ve seen the movie Inside Out, you might remember the emotions appear as smaller characters inside the main character’s brain. The emotions take turns wresting control from each other. This premise is reminiscent of Internal Family Systems Therapy. IFS teaches that the mind is a committee that includes the infamous Inner Critic along with other personas. In my case, there’s an Inner Xena, an Inner Nerd, and various other characters. The ultimate goal of this therapy is to empower the wisest inner self, the self that is unattached to outcome.

Enabling that wise self seems like the ultimate way to create space. After all, if we are not tied to things going our way, why not cut everyone (ourselves included) some slack? Isn’t that the height of wisdom? Perhaps connecting with that wise self is easier later in life, as awareness grows of our own mortality. That’s an idea worth taking time to ponder, even at the expense of putting off a few To Do items.