The Space Between

On waiting, and having enough reasons to get up in the morning

🌸 ikigai 生き甲斐 is a reason for being, your purpose in life - from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth 🌸

In Japanese there is a word for the space between things.

Ma, 間. The pause that is not empty. A gap between stepping stones. The beat in the lines of a poem. Silence between notes that makes music music. The same character sits inside the Japanese words for both time, jikan 時間, and space, kūkan 空間, because ma is the interval in each of them, the threshold between now and next… and the character itself 間 is derived from the character 門 for door or gate, and 日 for sun. Sunlight streaming through the gaps of a door. Not nothing in other words… structure.

I have been thinking about ma a lot this week, in between a lot of waiting around as I was away at an exhibition for work all week… and because modern life (or AI for that matter) seems to not be able to cope with a gap. It asks you to watch a reel or ten, or autocompletes, autosuggests, wanting to fill every still moment before we have worked out whether the pause was a good idea to just sit with. Three dots appear the moment I stop typing. The next word arrives before I have finished thinking it. Efficiency hates a pause, and our tools have learned the same allergy.

This will be a shorter essay than usual, which is for sure very much some of the point.

The waiting

I have championed the space between for years, my bullet journal a shrine to it, and yet I can tell you honestly that the space between is not always easy or peaceful.

Waiting is an incongruous thing. Sometimes it is a window opened, breathing room you did not know you were owed. Sometimes it is the heaviest thing in the world. Sometimes it is both at the exact same time leaving you adrift and unable to fully articulate that feeling.

Psychologists have a name for one particular kind of waiting. Anticipatory grief, the mourning that begins before a loss does. Grief with its tenses confused, missing something that is still here, feeling homesick for a place you have not yet left. It arrives in hospital corridors and redundancy consultations, in the last week of the summer holidays, in a parent watching a child learn to drive away.

I suspect more of us are carrying a version of it than ever say out loud. Some for people. Some for places… and some for lives we can feel changing faster than we can keep up with. When I write about the ikigai risk of AI, the erosion of purpose as machines absorb some of the work through which we find meaning, I am also describing anticipatory grief at scale, a workforce mourning something that has not finished happening yet.

Grief before loss is a very strange thing, but it tells the truth. We only pre-mourn what matters.

Enough reasons

So what do we do, in the waiting?

This is where the Japanese understanding of ikigai really resonates for me. Ikigai as the psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya described it in the 1960s, a felt sense, ikigai-kan, the lived experience that a life is worth living. And so very importantly, plural. Not one grand purpose but many smaller ones. The morning tea. The elderly cat commandeering the warmest chair. The Manx homework. The friend who stays for one more cup. A tapestry, not a thread.

Which gives me the most practical definition of resilience I have;

Resilience means having enough reasons to get up in the morning that losing one doesn’t keep you in bed.

A tapestry survives a pulled thread. This is not stoicism and it is not detachment, it is weaving… done in advance on the good days, so that the fabric holds on the others. Every small joy you tend now load-bearing later. Purpose is not only a direction to march in. It is also what keeps us standing when marching is not possible, and waiting is the only thing there is.

Fermata

I could not fully write an essay-shaped version of what this waiting feels like, so here is a poem-shaped one.

Fermata

A mark in music that means hold
For as long as the moment needs.
The page stops counting the time.
Whoever holds the note decrees.

The song does not stop there.
We keep braiding melody, words and feeling
The pause belongs to the held breath,
The not-yet of chorus saved for the healing.

Some days the pause is a window opened.
Some days a weight held at arm’s length in the rain
Some days it’s both, brutal and beautiful.
A price paid purposefully in peace and pain.

The rarest pauses are a person,
In a place the noise won’t follow
A doorway holding space and time,
Today on one side, and then tomorrow.

In Japanese, the space is drawn as light
Inside a gate called Ma 間 and it’s true
The sun stands easy on the threshold
No one else says when it moves through.

Some people are the shining in the gap,
Warm on both sides of the door
The kind of life you set your course by,
A lamp light left burning on the shore.

Slack water, the sailors call it
When the tide has nowhere it needs to be,
Neither coming in nor going,
The glorious green still alive in the sea.

Petals meet on water like that
Orchid, dahlia, bluebell, blossom in spring
Drifting the same slow circle,
Loved and not asked for a single thing.

A rest is not the absence of music
It’s silence written in the score.
It counts the same as any note,
And it will count for evermore.

And if the page stops counting,
The ones who love you keep the beat,
And the mark above the whole long bar
Says the word that makes the song complete;

Hold.

We keep the beat

That is all this week, and I hope it is enough. I invite you to sit inside your pauses gently. Whatever they hold, they are counted, and so are you.

I am carrying this question onwards, and one I hope for you to share too. What am I weaving now, on the good days, that will hold me on the others? When did you last add a new one?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet journal spread for this week, a thread audit. List (or if you are feeling artistic sketch or doodle) your reasons for getting up in the morning, every small one counts, as together they would still hold if any of them frayed. Then consider adding one deliberately thin new thread this month! Share if there is a hobby or interest you have been meaning to pursue but had been putting off!

PPS Try this with your preferred AI tool.

“Help me take an audit of all the small reasons my days feel worth living, and suggest a tiny new thread I could add this month. Don’t optimise, just help me see them.”

PPPS This week’s soundtrack is Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode, and yes, I know, a glittering anthem in praise of saying nothing at all. The weirdness is because waiting is an incongruous thing, and so is one of the best songs ever written about it. Words are very unnecessary, but they are also all I ever turn to when processing…. turn it up and let it hold you.