Making room

Dark moon today (new moon is at 2:12 a.m. tomorrow). Excellent time to think about the dark spaces in our lives.


It’s not that there’s nothing there, any more than a dark moon is equal to no moon at all. We just can’t see what’s there. Or maybe we refuse to look. Or we look in the wrong direction.

Or maybe it’s stuff we should be letting go of.

Maybe we look at that dark-moon space and think—I could put something there. I could fill that with love and joy and creativity and…but then you go there and discover that there’s something already there, you just weren’t paying that much attention to it. You thought you didn’t spend that much time watching TV, for example, until you go to block out play time, or writing time, or whatever-it-is-that-fulfills-you time, and catch yourself in an old habit of, say, Criminal Minds. Not that I spend any time watching that, or anything. Or Life After People. We create this dark hole of background in our lives—reading the paper, watching TV, surfing the net, playing that silly bubble-shooting game until our brain looks like we’ve been doing crack. And we don’t realize that the hole has become the whole until we try to put something in the corner it occupies.

We often think we “can’t do without” whatever it is that takes up space—whether it’s energy space, time space, or physical space—even though if we looked at it objectively, we’d realize that just like the statisticians say, 90% of the time we wear 10% of the clothes in our closet. And the reason we haven’t written the great American novel or trained to run the Boston Marathon is that we spend our time doing things that in the end—or even in the now—mean next to nothing to us.

If you skipped the news, how much time would that free up? If you stopped watching TV, or cleaned out your closet, or did away with gossip, what changes in the paradigm of your day? If you let go of the things you don’t care about, how much room would you have for the things you love?