025 - The Space In-Between In Which We All Live

 

 

The Space In-Between in Which We All Live

The house is freshly cleaned.  It was deep cleaning that happened this past weekend.  The fridge and closets and cupboards – all the storage spaces – were sorted.  What needs to be let go, re-purposed and released?  What has a place in my world? Putting things in place, one after the other:  it creates structure.  Because of this structure, there is space.  It is a space in-between in which we all live. Thank you for joining us as we reflect on limits, and limitlessness, and the space in-between in which we all live. What gives us space?  It is because of the walls of the room, the ceiling and the floor, that we have a space that we call a “room”.  The walls make it a room.  There is the sky and the earth, the top and the bottom:  we live sandwiched in that space in-between.  It is beautiful, pragmatic logic which was much appreciated in the ancient Indian worldview.  We all live in that space in-between the sky and the earth.  We all live in that space in-between our birth and our death.  We are mortal.  Because we are born, we will die.  In this world, where time is round, because we die we will be re-born.  It happens all the time.  We die to what was in order to create the space in which to welcome what is to come.  It is why we do deep cleaning in the spring:  we let go in order to be able to receive with an open hand…in that space in-between our birth and our death. It’s like that space between cause and effect, between action and re-action, between the seed and the fruit.  Because of our limits, we live to grow beyond them. In the ancient Indian world, Yama was the god of the dead.  His name means “to constrain”.  He is “constraint”, or limit, personified.  Death is the ultimate limit.  Perhaps that’s why we call them “deadlines”. God of the dead, Yama is king of the ancestors.  He gives us our life on loan:  he will take it back again.  We possess our life; we do not own it. We embody it for a time; in the end, we must let go of it. So he offers us a life that has meaning:  now matters because it will never come again; today matters because one day I will die. It is the structure of things – boundaries and limits – that gives us lives that have room to grow in, just as surely as we have a room because of its walls.  Do our walls hold us in, hold us up, or hold us back? How we work with what appears to be our walls creates the shape of lives in that space in-between. Much of the beauty of the natural world is revealed to us by means of its structure:  the discipline of timing as the sun comes up and goes down again incrementally increasing length of day or length of night. The veins that form the structure in the leaves, the veins that permit the blood flow through my body and yours:  it is the disciplined structure of things that creates the space through which our life flows. It is a respecting of structure and limits that gives us room to move:  the discipline of time, the discipline of working with money…because we know how to respect limits, we know how to give ourselves space, the freedom to have room to move.  Because there are boundaries in relationship, there can be closeness. Are the longest lasting relationships those that best know how to give each other space so there is room to grow as individuals and also room to grow together? We are born, we live, and we die.  Live as if we were going to live forever – as if our actions had no consequences – and somehow we become less alive….as if nothing mattered. Our days they say are counted like so many beads on a prayer string. The sun comes up; the sun goes down:  one bead is counted after the other. Ancient India had no word for continuous time.  What was understood was a series of moments – like a series of heartbeats.  What is to say that one heartbeat will follow the next:  nothing at all.

Do you know someone – or perhaps it is yourself – who once received a fatal medical diagnosis?  Who once had a doctor come to them and say:  I am so sorry but this could kill you?  Maybe it was cancer.  Maybe it was something else.  That person who was told that she would die:  did she somehow become more alive afterwards? Often it happens only when life shows us mortality very clearly that somehow we become more alive. We see more clearly what is important and what is not. We choose to do what matters. We let go of what does not. All those things that we wish to do someday, somehow we make room for them now.  We live because one day we will all die. It is our limits that give us our life and our death. Can we distinguish between the limits that are real and the limits that are not?  What are the limits that serve us like the walls that hold up my room and to give me space in which to live?  What are the limits that do not serve us, that somehow hold us back or keep us contained, so that we are squeezed and confined, and it becomes not room to live but rather confinement in which we slowly die.

Sometimes limits are real, like the space in-between our birth and our death. Sometimes limits are imposed upon us in ways that appear but are not really real at all. It is one of the old definitions of enlightenment:  the wise can distinguish between appearance and reality, between the true and the false.

Often we get stronger because we fight against limits and eventually strong enough to let them go. Who defines the limits of that space in between in which I am living? Am I acting because of my perception of what is possible for me, or am I confining myself to someone else's perception of what is possible for me? My concept of me is a reflection of me.  Their concept of me is a reflection of them. Our limits give us our life and our death:  believe in limits that are not really real, and it becomes a means not to live but instead to die.

The structure of things:  it’s what gives us the room, to explore, to discover, to live, and to grow. We are limited, and limitless simultaneously. If it is our death that makes this moment have meaning because it is limited, how we choose to respond and to rise up in this space in-between can be beyond measure.  Finite and infinite, limited and limitless:  it is a space in-between in which we all live. 

The quality of the relationship that you have with the outside world directly relates to the quality of relationship you have with yourself.  Come see us at “justbreatheyouareenough.com” and join the JBYAE community.

I'm Adela, and you've been listening to Just Breathe....You Are Enough™.  You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, rate and review this podcast. Join us next time, and thank you for listening.

 

Copyright © 2019, Adela Sandness