I’ve been thinking about space.
Not the kind you find. The kind you make.
I sit with a lot of students. And lately, in conversation after conversation, I keep hearing the same thing underneath the words. They’re tired. Not sleep-tired, though that too. Tired in a deeper way. Tired of the noise. Tired of the pace. Tired of moving from one thing to the next without ever really landing anywhere.
They say they want quiet. They crave it. And then they fill every gap with a screen, a sound, a scroll, a task. Not because they’re distracted or lazy. But because quiet asks something of us. And most of us were never taught what that is.
Space doesn’t happen on its own.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. If you wait for it, you’ll wait a long time. The world is not going to slow down and hand you a moment of stillness. The calendar fills. The notifications stack. The to-do list regenerates overnight like it’s alive.
Space has to be chosen. Intentionally. Deliberately. Which means something else has to be set down in order to hold it.
That’s harder than it sounds.
There are different kinds of space, I think.
There’s the space for silence. Not absence of sound exactly, but absence of demand. No one needing something from you. No voice in your ear telling you what to do next.
There’s the space for stillness. Which is different from silence. You can be still in a noisy room if the stillness is internal. A kind of settling.
There’s the space to remember. To let old thoughts surface without chasing them. To sit with a memory long enough for it to tell you something.
There’s the space to imagine. To wonder without any expectation that the wondering will produce anything useful.
And there’s the space to just be. No output. No performance. No role to play. Just yourself, present, breathing, here.
Here’s what I’ve been sitting with: creating space is sometimes a sacred experience.
And sometimes it’s a scared one.
Both at the same time.
When the noise stops, really stops, you have to meet yourself. And that can feel like stepping into something holy. Or something unsettling. Often both at once. There’s a reason we stay busy. There’s a reason the silence can feel like a problem to solve rather than a gift to receive.
But I think the sacred and the scared live right next to each other in this. And maybe learning to create space means learning to sit in that tension long enough to find out what’s on the other side.
I don’t have a tidy ending for this one.
I’m still figuring it out myself. Still learning to hold the door open for stillness instead of letting it pass.
But I think it starts with deciding that space is worth making. That it won’t just appear. That an hour, a morning, a quiet corner, a deliberate pause. These things have to be chosen.
And that choosing them is not laziness or indulgence.
It might be the most intentional thing you do all week.
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