I suppose, in a way, I've been thinking a lot about space and time lately. Not from a scientific perspective. I'm not necessarily talking about astronomical space or universal time, but rather the "spaces" that one finds in their life and in their time, and the latent possibility and potentiality that lurks there.
Since my ex-wife and I separated in early January, I've found myself with an abundance of space and a seeming surplus of time. At first the oncoming flood of space and time was overwhelming and even disconcerting because I didn't quite know what to do with it, didn't know how to utilize it. I was being met with a jarring emptiness,of space, a vexing vacuity of time.
At some point it began to feel a bit more like a blessing. I now had all this time and space in which to create and be creative. Space in which to experiment with possibility. Time in which to explore potentiality.
But, there still remains this creeping feeling in even this creative space and time, an unexplained eeriness that waxes and wanes amongst the open terrain potential and possibility. I am coming to grips with a sense of constriction and confinement.
Even in meeting with a kind of freedom and liberty I feel a tightening, a recoiling. The blankness upon the upon the horizon is terrifying. The openness is alien.
Sartre said that "man is condemned to be free". That says a lot about us as species when we can somehow manage to turn freedom into confinement. I think its because we implicitly and inherently crave any semblance of security we can be afforded. And more often than not, we find that security in being confined. As John O'Donohue suggests, it is "the security of confinement and limitation that we know" that grants us a sense of safety.
Perhaps, there is a latent terror always-already hidden underneath freedom. I feel that sense of condemnation that Sartre speaks of, and I don't yet have answer for it, or a way to be fully at peace with it...
I'm trying to recognize that every day we are gifted with space, an infinity of creative space. A lush expanse of space in which to breathe in the blankness. We are graced with the presence of open possibility. We are greeted by the invisible potency of potentiality. And yet we often respond with resistance, choosing the paralyzing restraint of self-confinement.
And I'm also trying to recognize that, as O'Donohue says "To go beyond confinement is to rediscover yourself."