Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Negative Space
“Negative space, in art, is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image. Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such space occasionally is used to artistic effect as the ‘real’ subject of an image.” -Wikipedia
I started thinking about negative space last week when I was reading Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown. There are so many great things about this book and one of the greatest is his insistence that we create time to do nothing. By doing nothing, he doesn’t mean sit on the couch and eat chips and watch Homeland. By doing nothing, he means: think, doodle, just be.
As much as I intuitively know this is true on a deep-gut level, my immediate reaction (like many of you, I imagine) was, “No way, that’s not gonna happen, I’m way too busy.” In the book, McKeown talks about a CEO who was so busy he couldn’t process one meeting before the next began. He couldn’t see the forest, so he was doomed to mediocrity at best. As a solution, he began “scheduling two hours of blank space” on his calendar every day.” When I read “blank space,” I immediately visualized that blank space in the calendar and it made me think of the concept of negative space in art.
I’ve always loved this concept, it suits my whole “do more with less” ethos and it is a big part of Japanese art, which I love. Their word for it is ma, meaning the spaces in between. Practiced in everything from flower arranging to the work of Noguchi, ma is the art of leaving space around so that you can better see the flower or the shape, whatever is essential.
I’m always talking about making things richer, trying to get my kids to savor one piece of expensive chocolate rather than scarfing down a Hershey bar, and I think this is the same concept related to time. If you just zip from one experience to another, are you just a tumbleweed accumulating but not really evolving? What would happen if we did less but experienced it more? If we took 15 minutes post-yoga to just notice how we feel in that good space? What if we took 30 minutes after meeting with our accountant to really contemplate what she said and think about what steps we might take to make our financial lives smoother. That half-hour might come back to us in both time and money saved. If we bother to do things, shouldn’t we give them their due?
So think about carving some ma into your life. Give yourself the opportunity to really be present for what you choose to do, and on the way, you may find there are things that don’t need to be on your calendar at all.