The emptiness
Heart leap writing hour starts at 9am.
“You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you.” Dan Millman
It’s the end of week three’s of February’s Little Reset and we’ve been clearing space. A drawer, a desk, a corner of the kitchen table, perhaps even a little pocket in your diary where nothing is scheduled and no one is expecting you.
The instinct, at least in my life, is to admire it briefly and then promptly fill it back up again. A cleared bedside cabinet becomes a landing strip for books, receipts and lip balms. A free Tuesday morning quietly acquires a coffee, a call, a “quick” errand that takes 25 hours.
But what if we let the space languish without filling it?
This week I haven’t had much choice. I’m playing nurse to my poor old boyfriend as he waits for a heart operation. We can’t go far. There are no wild plans. There is just… time. Time sitting beside him, staring out of the window. Time in which my mind, if left unsupervised, can head off into catastrophic daydreams. I am, by nature, a worrier. Give me an empty hour and I can populate it with seventeen hypothetical disasters and a pile of Cadbury Creme Egg foil balls. (Surely that’s not just me?)
It has made me realise something slightly uncomfortable. Busyness can be a brilliant avoidance strategy for me. If I am organising, producing, fixing, planning, I do not have to feel the wobble underneath. I do not have to sit with uncertainty. I do not have to admit that I am scared.
Clearing a space, then, is not the whole story. The more interesting question is: what are we clearing it for?
Because space will always be filled. Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the human psyche. If we don’t consciously choose what comes into that fresh square of air, the usual suspects march straight back in — worry, old coffee cups, Cadbury’s Creme eggs, scrolling, low-level anxiety dressed up as “research.” My old habits are very efficient tenants.
But there is another possibility. When I consciously focus my attention away from the worry and doomscrolling, other more positive thoughts can and do emerge. An idea for a scene in my novel, a wave of tenderness for the man on the sofa beside me. I can even replace worry with black humour and I’m laughing rather than wringing my hands.
Not sure I can give up my Cadburys creme egg habit though.
(Maybe I won’t have to - next week on the final week of the Little February Reset - we get to add in one nice thing every day. Stay tuned.)
Prompt:
Where in your life have you created space — and then rushed to fill it? This week, can you protect one small pocket of emptiness and consciously choose what (or who) you want to invite into it?
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