Dancing with Spaciousness

After eight years at Google, I am taking a break. A break that tastes like potential, like possibility, like space.

And like unknown.

I have no idea of what will emerge in this time. No plan, no grand vision. What I know is that it is already working in me, the magic of Life being able to unfold as it wants. Synchronicities start to become more obvious, Beauty more present. I open a magazine lying on my table in a restaurant and land on an article about the Raute people, one of the last remaining nomadic groups in Nepal. They live in forests and do not have a word for 'time'. In their language, there is also no word for tomorrow, or for yesterday, because they don't use these concepts as units to measure and make sense of time. Time isn't compartmentalised neatly into hours and days, weekends or years.

This does not mean that they are unaware of the passage of time. They just don't understand it to be the fixed, linear force we imagine it to be. Life is imagined to unfold, unsurprisingly, in alignment with movements of the natural world - in cycles, strongly influenced by the changing seasons and the evolution of light. They orient themselves by looking at the arrival of day and night, the evolution of colours and temperatures, by listening to the sounds of birds that migrate and leaves that fall.

No, I am not planning on becoming a nomadic hunter-gatherer during my sabbatical - although admittedly I did spend my weekend in the forest, making mushroom tinctures and in a general state of awe with the beauty and wisdom I start to sense more and more in the natural world. I am also not fantasising with a societal shift that has us all returning to a candle-lit, clock-free, carpe-diem kind of life (although it is an interesting thought experiment to wonder about).

What comes up in me and what I desire to share with you is a bubbling sense of possibility. When I contemplate alternative ways of living and relating to time, it feels like gentle fireworks in my belly, as it reminds me how concepts that we so often perceive to be universal and unchangeable - as time - are in fact malleable. They are conventions of our culture, not facts of nature.

Which means that they can be shaped to our delight.

Remembering that we live embedded in conventions, collective agreements that we have opted into - consciously or unconsciously - is powerful. Why? Because it brings back awareness to the fact that we have a choice. We get to choose how we experience time, how we play with it as a creative force. Our dominant culture might continue to dance to the trance of the Great Acceleration, but nomadic tribes with literally no word for time co-exist with us in this reality, moving at a very different rhythm. We have a say and a personal choice to make. To me, this is probably one of the most powerful spells to break out of, the belief that 'we have no time'.

And it goes beyond time, our ability to create with our choices. There is so much potential in being aware that we can dream up different ways of knowing and being and moving in the world.

For myself, during this time of spaciousness, I desire to play with slowing down, quieting the noise. Creating more and more space, decluttering. Shifting from forceful effort to organic unfolding, moving my attention from consumption to creation.

I imagine this to be a practice, an alive process. I imagine it to unfold in ways that resist all predictions, I imagine being surprised, over and over again, and humbled into remembering that the limited rules of logic are melted by the exquisitely mysterious unfolding of Life.

And you, what will we do with all this delicious unknown?