WHITE SPACE

One afternoon when I was in my second year of high school, I was in a computer lesson. This was at a time before we had the Internet but word processors and spreadsheets were becoming more widely used. Computing was a very new subject. My classmates and I had very little experience with computers, so the subject we were doing was an introductory course, and at the time we were learning how to use a word processor. The task set by the teacher in this particular lesson was to design a poster. The content of the poster was up to us but we were to demonstrate that we could use different font styles and font sizes, align the text appropriately and lay it out on the page in a way that was appealing to the reader. The more capable students in the class could even include a picture.

After a little while, a buzz started to make its way around the room: ‘You need White Space. The more White Space you have the better your poster will be.’ I wasn’t sure what White Space was but I soon learned that it was empty gaps or spaces in the poster where no text was written. White Space helped to spread everything out and made the poster much easier to read. So I stopped trying to cram information onto my poster because it seemed more important to have it spaced out, and I was always the type of student to take whatever advice I could get in order to earn as high a mark as possible.

I have never forgotten the idea of White Space. It is not a term that I hear used very often. Although I cannot remember who the teacher was in that class or who any of the other students were, I clearly remember the message that empty space makes posters, documents, letters etc. much easier to read. More recently, I have begun thinking about another application of White Space and the need for it in our day-to-day lives. Life today tends to be so busy and packed full of commitments, that many of us feel we are stuck on a merry-go-round that never stops; it just keeps speeding up. I feel there is a desperate need for periods of quiet and rest to restore some balance in lives that are otherwise becoming frantic, stressed and often unmanageable. Just as White Space refers to parts of a page that are left blank, I will use it to refer to the times when we pause and allow stillness into our lives.

There have been many times in my life when I felt as though I was in a rush, and at times the pace of my life has gathered a momentum of its own which I have been unable to stop. When I am in a rush I lose my sense of enjoyment of simple activities. One of my favourite leisure activities is to go for a walk by the river, but I know that unless I am in a calm state of mind I won’t enjoy the walk at all because I will be thinking about all the other things I could be doing. In order to enjoy a walk, I need to be relaxed, calm and have my attention on the time and place where I am; to feel the breeze on my face, hear the birds singing and admire the beautiful trees and water. If my mind is elsewhere I miss all of this and the walk becomes just another task that I squeeze into my already full day. It is important to take time to smell the roses, but I must remember to notice the perfume, enjoy the sensation and keep my mind in the present moment, rather than letting it rush ahead to the future or slip back into the past. I have a tendency to become swept into the future tense. So much of my thinking gets taken up with planning exactly what I will do for the rest of the day, often squeezing in as many tasks as I possibly can. This means I’m not enjoying what I’m doing at any given moment because I’m thinking about what I’m going to do in the future. Getting caught up in the past is equally as dangerous, reliving old times that we have no power to change.

When I take things slowly, I am able to achieve much more with my time because I am fresh, alert and calm. This is ironic because the whole point of rushing is to try to achieve more but, in fact, the reverse is true. Through not rushing, I am able to achieve more. Through slowing down, I actually gain momentum. I do things properly rather than superficially. At first you would think that by slowing down you sacrifice quantity of time in order to have more quality time, but in reality you end up with both. The truth is that you end up with significantly more quantity as well because by attempting to achieve fewer tasks, each task has more time. I function much more effectively when I operate in this way.

In some ways I believe life is not meant to be easy, because we are on earth for such a short time to learn as much as we can, and we learn most through the challenges presented to us. But I also think that in many ways life is not meant to be nearly as difficult as we make it. We only need to observe nature to see how fluent life is, and we are very much a part of nature so there ought to be a flow in our lives as well. Through living in the present moment and accepting ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in, we ought to be able to go with the flow of life and be carried along, rather than struggling every step of the way.

It is only through learning how to slow down that I have come to understand how much I neglected to accept the flow of life when I was continually in a rush. Put simply, when I was rushing, I wasn’t functioning at my best. I was inflicting a very negative mindset onto myself. I didn’t feel as though I had any say in it, but I have come to realise that I always have a choice and the decision I made was to slow down. I’m not saying it was easy but it was definitely my choice. Having made some progress I can now understand how much better it feels to live life more slowly, or at least at a more consistent pace. I am putting myself first and deliberately improving the quality of my life because I deserve no less than this.

In order to slow myself down, it has been absolutely necessary for me to have periods of quiet and rest in my life. Once I stopped operating at such a frantic pace, I soon was reminded of my computer lesson from all those years ago, as I saw a lot of similarities between the gaps of quiet in my life and the White Space that we were encouraged to use in the presentation of our posters. Therefore I have come to call rest times White Space. Actively practising White Space has greatly improved my quality of life. Particularly in this day and age, many of us are so busy and feel overwhelmed with what we are doing. I became swept up in the pace of life more than ever before when I experienced the rushing sensation that I have described. As I learned to recover I realised how valuable peace and serenity are, and the idea for this book was born out of a desire to share this knowledge with others.

If someone were to ask me ‘What is White Space?” my response would be that White Space is the gaps of nothing that create breathing space in our lives. White Space provides us with a new way of looking at the world, and the more we incorporate White Space into our everyday lives, the more our quality of life will improve.

There are many benefits to incorporating White Space into your life. It creates space, it brings peace and it introduces clarity. It offers a new perspective; a fresh way of viewing the world with an increased ability to solve problems. It increases quality of life, it lowers stress levels and it leads to better health, improved relationships and more fulfilment. There are times now when I find it easy to incorporate White Space into my life but still other times when it is almost impossible. For me, it is a goal that I am constantly striving for and I am very grateful that it gets easier with practice.