Live Spaciously

In his fascinating book Space, Time and Medicine, Dr. Larry Dossey explores the way our health is related to how we imagine and occupy space and time. He writes of his work with Native American patients whose understanding of time is more cyclical than linear and how that image of time shapes the way they live into a day or a week or a season.

The notion of time as a line, a road, a race to a goal imposes its own stress. Cyclical time allows us to relax into the season we’re in, knowing it comes with its own gifts, and that other seasons will come in due time with theirs. The liturgical year retains some of the wisdom of the great cycles that continually remind us of recurrence and release. “Modern time,” as he calls it brings with it its own diseases, most related to the stress of feeling driven, locked into schedules that are both tedious and erratic.

Spaciousness is a way of occupying both the times and the spaces we inhabit. One of the people I think of as living spaciously is a woman who lived in small apartment and worked in a small office on a very small budget. But her mind and imagination were wide, her conversation deep and leisurely and laced with wit, and her small table made lovely by an antique cloth and a small vase of flowers. She had many projects afoot, and a study full of books and papers, but her home felt like a place where one might “dwell in possibility,” welcomed and invited to expand.

A spacious heart says there is enough room. There is enough time. You don’t need to suppress what needs to be brought forth, compress what needs to open up, exclude what needs to be included. There is room to explore. There is time to wait for unfolding, to watch the hummingbird hover or the child complete her task.

A small practice that has helped me regain a sense of spaciousness and deepen breath that has been shallowed by a hurried and overcommitted day is to say to myself, instead of “I only have five minutes,” “I have five whole minutes.” Suddenly, when I pause and do that simple mental exercise, time and space open up a little and I can take a breath, regroup, and return my energies to the moment with more clarity and peace.

Spaciousness of the kind I’m imagining has little to do with the overwrought focus on efficiency that drives so many institutional and personal decisions. It allows one to consider, at least, taking the scenic route rather than the 6-lane freeway; playing on the floor with a child instead of handing him toys and returning to housework; spreading out a project, putting on music, and making the mess required rather than worrying overmuch about what is out of place. Living spaciously is another way of choosing life—a thing we are commanded to do so that our days may be long and our hearts hospitable.