The Art of Holding Space
Living our way to meaning – By Stacey Huget
There can be so much “holding space” in our lives – for opposing thoughts, for the light and dark of our emotions, for how our past flows through our present and into our future, and for both the mindful and sometimes mindless choices we make as we live our way into meaning.
This being human can be both exhausting and exhilarating.
If we choose to, we can hold a LOT of space for our thoughts. We give birth to these babies at immeasurable speed – a slippery mess of partially formed and half-conscious awarenesses. It’s scary to think of our thoughts as our operating system because the reality they manufacture is a tentative one – susceptible to delusion, in need of hyper-vigilance, and subject to continual revision. The older we get, the more we wonder: when is this not true, or that – and what opposite truths might we need to make room for, and do we even need to choose or prove one over the other? Can we just hold space for them all at once, this landscape of multiple, seemingly-irreconcilable truths? And all the while, we can be thinking about the process of thinking about our thoughts. Swirling eddies and endless rabbit holes appearing and disappearing before us until we feel the weight and wings of imprisoned freedom within our own minds. We are moving fast within it, yet motionless, and the speed and stillness of it takes our breath away
But our thoughts are not the only thing we hold space for. Like ink in water, our emotions roil within us – arising and tumbling and receding, welcome and unwelcome, vivid and murky, ever malleable. If we’re in a dark space, where sadness or fear or anger arise, and we find ourselves plummeting downward into that shadowy abyss, we learn to conjure up the radiant, soothing embrace of our own love and joy and gratitude – and hold space for all these feelings at once. We can be both buoyed up and pulled down, bursting and empty, vital and spent, until a bittersweet poignancy fills us up and the dread and delight of living takes our breath away.
There’s a timelessness to all this space-holding. We can be in the present, doing what we’re doing, suddenly conscious of the past flowing through and shaping our behaviour, often against our will, and simultaneously imagining ourselves showing up differently in the future – and then there we are in the past and present and future all at once, on a kind of whispering continuum looping along everyone else’s whispering continuums. We imagine ourselves just waves of energy, wisps of sound and imagery, vibrating as we rocket to and from and around some unknown somewhere, only to find ourselves having never left – and the velocity of a single moment takes our breath away.
And there it is, the promise and the punishment, the thing we’re holding all this space for – that search for the meaning of our lives. We don’t want to miss it, only we’re holding so much space for it, we don’t know where to find it, where to look. We think it might be everywhere, in everything – but then again no, it eludes us, slippery as a fish. There and not there.
And then like a slap in the face, it hits us: that as we are busy dancing on this continuum, careening off into our timeless inner space, we are yet again not being mindful (as we intended) of the present moment. So hard to do, to just be unfettered in this moment, and then this one, and then the next – our attention pure, our judgment unclouded by the debris of the past or the phantoms of the future. How many choices have we made, how many emotions have we nurtured, in these mindless moments, one part of us carrying us off without our even knowing it at the time, or even later? How many moments have we lost altogether, forfeited into our past – unseen, unappreciated, irredeemable. Will this be our stunning revelation at the end of our lives, that we just weren’t paying enough attention? The unbearable grief of imagining takes our breath away.
And there it is, the promise and the punishment, the thing we’re holding all this space for – that search for the meaning of our lives. We don’t want to miss it, only we’re holding so much space for it, we don’t know where to find it, where to look. We think it might be everywhere, in everything – but then again no, it eludes us, slippery as a fish. There and not there.
Yes, we humans have an enormous capacity for holding space. Our minds and emotions offer up an intense experience – of anguish and entertainment and deep connection and enlightenment. All are possible. Every conceivable thing is possible because we are conceiving it. It’s all so staggeringly arbitrary and compelling at the same time.
But here’s the thing: the longer we do it and the bigger the space we’re holding becomes – the easier it gets. We learn to detach from more and more of the outcomes in our lives, and just become enthralled in the process of thinking and feeling and connecting, fascinated by the layers and nuances and contradictions within us and around us. We learn to dance with all the paradoxes in this fantastical space we are holding, the only space we know – and are discovering still. And we dial down our expectations for some brilliant flash of insight as to the meaning of life.
We are already living it.
