Making Space in 2023

On tangible results, open water, and ferocious attention

I am, predictably, the kind of person who loves the ritual of reflecting and setting goals each new year. Novelty and potential delight me, and so does marching through a list of achievements over twelve months. But this year, I did not launch into January with any concrete aims. No goals tied to a particular timeline. Not even a “more of this, less of that” kind of list. Just one word to provide some very loose direction: space.

I slid into the end of 2022 a bit defeated, as far as ambitions go. Last year I wrote thousands of words that, for various reasons, likely will never be read. Some of that is how the world of writing, and particularly freelancing, works. You draft pitches that may never turn into a story. You spend months meticulously sculpting essays that may never be published, doomed instead to languish in the purgatory of Submittable. Fallow seasons come and go. Rejections are a normal and even instructive part of writing, but at times they come thicker and faster than usual. There were some lovely developments, too—great clients, new local writing connections, a few collaborations, retreats, honors for a story, a fellowship—but on a whole, I couldn’t help but feel like I ended last year with little in the way of tangible results.

The layer beneath this is that I had a baby and took time off and breastfed my daughter throughout the year which meant pumping when I was working or traveling, all of which meant I wrote less, both for pay and for myself. I should have, obviously, seen this dip in output coming. But it has taken me that entire first year of her life to come to grips with the fact that my capacity is not what it was before: that I can do less and achieve less in a week than when my days were arranged around my own needs. It is not actually true that I am “doing less” now that I’m a parent, only that I am doing less of what I would previously have qualified as “work.” (This undervaluing of caregiving is something that many writers have thought eloquently about, so I won’t head down that rabbit hole).

When I look back on last year, I understand that the most important work happened behind the scenes. I think of the intimate and physical labor involved in nursing and dressing and changing and feeding and carrying an infant. I picture standing next to my husband at the kitchen sink as we washed our daughter’s body, her wet seal skin slippery and new. And I think, too, about the writing I did in fragments—the notes tapped on my phone or the unfinished sentences scribbled on a legal pad or the voice memos recorded on walks. Last year was the most generative year of my life, bursting with effort and inspiration—none of which is public or quantifiable. The work that matters most to me is also the work that frustrates my Type-A efforts to tally up a list of accomplishments at the year’s end.

There’s no single neat parallel between parenting and writing. But both are creative; both are non-linear. Neither follow my own or our culture’s expectations for what constitutes productivity. Then again, neither does joy, or sorrow, or rest. Parenting has been one long lesson in inefficiency. What kind of work is measurable? Does it matter less—or more—if it can’t be measured? The word “immeasurable” is interesting; look at it one way and it seems small, as in resisting measure by its unimportance. Flip it over and it means beyond measure, enormous.

All of that is to say, I decided that “space” would be a helpful word to carry into 2023. I picked it because the word suggests openness to possibility and a refusal to jam-pack each hour, but I suspect the word will branch out in other directions over the course of the year. From this vantage point, at least, it’s a touchstone for the kind of life I want to create: one that makes room for others, for interruptions, and for unaccounted hours. A life with breathing room. Instead of trying to wring the maximum amount of tasks out of a day—or, less grimly, the most experiences out of my year—I am trying to increase the margins of my life. If I made a “more of this, less of that” list for 2023, it might look like this: Less efficiency. Less of a stranglehold on my ambitions and timelines. More “pacific openness” (a phrase I read in Lauren Winner’s memoir Still and still find perfect).

One happy side effect about picking a word for the year is that it suddenly crops up more or less everywhere. This is probably the result of confirmation bias (like when you’re contemplating a certain haircut and then everyone you come in contact with has the same one), but it feels like serendipity. Which is what happened this week, when a friend shared this Ezra Klein podcast episode about the Sabbath (ty Martha!). I listened to it while making lunch and washing dishes on a weekday, and within the first several minutes the subject turned to space. I immediately turned off the faucet to listen more closely. Quoting the rabbi Abraham Heschel’s book The Sabbath, Klein says:

Heschel’s argument is that the modern world is obsessed with questions of space. We spend our days trying to master the spaces in which we live—building in them, acquiring from them, traversing them. And what we spend to do that is the time that we have to live. He writes, “Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result, we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.”

Space! There it was. Heschel writes that we don’t know what to do with time, or how to face its finitude, other than making it “subservient to space.” The Jewish Shabbat, or the Sabbath for Christians, is what Heschel calls a “cathedral in time.” It carves out a space in the week for rest, play, inefficiency, recovery, connection, and community. For those who practice Shabbat or Sabbath, a full one-seventh of life becomes a protected space, rather than just another day for mastering the spaces in which we live.

Creating pockets of space in our lives—or maybe simply resisting the urge to rush in and fill existing pockets—isn’t only or even mostly about self-care. Later in the episode, Klein mentions the Good Samaritan experiment conducted at Princeton Theological Seminary. Long story short, this study proved that we are far more likely to notice and attend to the needs of others when we’re not in a hurry. Students in the study who were forced to rush across campus failed to help the person in distress that they passed. In some cases, they failed even to notice the person. The psychologists who oversaw the experiment concluded that “ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily life increases.” We need to move slowly in order to notice our own and others’ needs. And we need the margin to rearrange our days on their behalf.

You don’t actually “make” space as if it’s a tangible thing to be constructed; you eliminate other things and space is what’s left. Sabbath rhythms are a way of eliminating certain things to create room for others. But even though space isn’t tangible, it seems to have a muscular ability to resist the forces that push us toward doing more, producing more, achieving more. When I think about space as a force of resistance against our (my) frenetic pace of living, I imagine a stent in an artery. From my paltry medical knowledge and some quick Googling, I can tell you that a stent works by being inserted into a blocked artery and expanding with the help of a tiny balloon. The stent sustains an opening in the artery. It increase blood flow, gives someone more life.

The essayist Brian Doyle published a short piece about his fascination with raptors (as in, hawks and their cousins) for Orion Magazine. I think about this essay often—or rather, I think about this particular bit:

Maybe being raptorous is in some way rapturous. Maybe what the word ‘rapture’ really means is an attention so ferocious that you see the miracle of the world as the miracle it is. Maybe that is what happens to saints and mystics who float up into the air and soar beyond sight and vanish finally into the glare of the sun.

The phrase I love here is “an attention so ferocious.” When I talk about space maybe I am really talking about making room for a ferocious form of attention. This kind of attention knows what to value when it happens, not only in hindsight. It deepens the experience of being alive: our specific, particular selves, embodied in this specific, particular moment. It’s the level of attention I want to bring to writing, to parenting, to prayer.

Busyness and productivity can be a comfort. Hurried is the pace I’m used to keeping, and probably the baseline pace for most of us. It’s unnerving for this over-achiever to drift into a new year with very few ambitions beyond creating space and being curious about what might grow there. Dropping down to a slower, more spacious plane is uncomfortable. I find it similar to the sensation of floating in open water. On the one hand, there’s the warmth of sun warming my neck and face, salty water keeping me afloat, the bob and swell of the waves. On the other, there’s that ever-present sense of vulnerability that comes with relinquishing control. And yet I want to go on floating.

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You should read this:

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. This is a beautiful book, one you could read in a single sitting with a very large mug of tea because it’s set in Ireland in 1985 and even though I’m not much of a tea drinker this book has a cozy, drink-something-warm-while-you-read-it feel, despite the at-times chilling subject matter. I knew nothing about Ireland’s mother and baby homes or Magdalen Laundries before reading Small Things Like These, and the short book is a haunting glimpse into these institutions. Keegan’s prose is spare and precise and full of empathy. I won’t say much about the plot other than this is a book about longing and choice and courage.