Imagine that you are exploring a new land. You studied the geography of the place and made your own map. You know where you want to be at the end of the journey.
In this unknown land, there are many dangers on the ground: moving roots, snakes, holes, and so forth. The only way to walk is watching each step. You start your adventure, paying close attention to each step you make.
You keep walking, never taking a break. You know you will arrive soon. Bam! In one moment you come to a sudden stop. Your head crashed against a massive branch you didn’t see. Now you decide to take a break while the pain and dizziness to go away. You look around and see your map looking for reference points. You start feeling uneasy, your gut tells you something is wrong. In that moment you’ve realized that you are very far from where you should be.
What happened?
You were so focused on your step that you never looked around to make sure you were heading toward the right direction. Every step you were deviating a little bit without noticing it. After 20,000 steps those small deviations compounded into heading the wrong way.
Every day we are walking with our heads down, that’s our daily lives. Messages and emails, work, keeping up with social life, and so forth. The map or the goal is our personal vision, where we want to be. The path we should take is the smaller goals we’ve set for ourselves that take us closer to our big goal. As we start going down our path, if we don’t pay attention we could end in a place we don’t want to be.
This map and this path you traced is just your idea of how things should be. You have a good idea of it, but the map is only a guide that tells you on which direction is your prize. It’s impossible to have a clear path as you don’t know this uncharted territory we call life. Since each step needs all your attention, it is necessary to make a pause and then to make sure you are on track. Those pauses is what I call empty space.
We live in the era of the distraction, the most wealthy and intelligent companies are competing for out attention, they live in our phones, our jobs, our relationships. We receive inputs 24/7: text messages, WhatsApp groups, emails, check this article, check this photo, and so forth. Most people I know start their day by checking their messages and then scrolling their favorite social media platform. The same goes for the last thing they do. Multiply this by 365 days and the year went by and you didn’t even noticed. In my article Living with Intention I presented the issue of living in autopilot, about how we suffer by pursuing someone else’s goals or working to meet the system’s agenda.
The problem is that we don’t take any pause to think about what we are doing and where we are heading. We only realize that we are far away from our goal when we’ve crashes — clothes don’t fit anymore, a bad fight with a loved one, debt, and the list goes on.
The Solution — Empty Space
Empty Space: Time in which you don’t receive any external inputs. Unstructured isolated space/time in which you just think and reflect.
I think about that ‘empty’ space a lot. That emptiness is what allows for something to actually evolve in a natural way. I’ve had to learn that over the years — because one of the traps of being an artist is to always want to be creating, always wanting to produce.
-Meredith Monk
It’s counterintuitive but in order to achieve more, we have to do less. It’s important to take time off and check if you are enjoying what you are doing, what you want to do, who you want to be. You could be working very hard, but what happens if you are working on something you don’t care about? Life is too short to waste it in meaningless pursuits.
This year I will actively pursue empty space. My goal is to spend more time doing nothing. I want to get bored, take long walks, turn off my phone. The challenge is avoiding the busy trap, it’s so easy to be available all the time waiting for the next message to reply.
Here are some suggestions for creating more Empty Space in your life:
- writing essays about a topic you want to explore in depth
- journaling is a great method for daily reflection
- meditation is a powerful practice that will help you observe your body sensations, thoughts, and emotions
- turning off your phone for a day is the most effective way to eliminate distractions
- my favorite: take a long walk, ideally in nature
The only shelter from 24/7 inputs is Empty Space. Taking time off every day and weeks is the only way to keep in control of what we do.
How are you creating empty space?
