The S P A C E Between
Opportunities appear when we open to possibility. Opening is releasing the grip of tension. Despite conventional renderings, or panicky manifestations, thinking we know what we want doesn’t always help. When we cling to a specific outcome we miss whatever else life may present.
And sometimes getting what we want is its own particular torture.
As the Bard wrote, “ah, there’s the rub“. When we are opening to our desires, we are also exposing ourselves to the possibility of danger. So, to hedge our bets, we close in on something, as if to capture it. Rather than opening to desire, we are closing down on the things we desire.
In this way, we are living in expectation rather than possibility much of the time .
Living in possibility requires we step outside the box. We move through life jumping from box to box like cats. Boxes soothe us. They define us. They protect us from the overwhelming vastness of everything that doesn’t fit neatly. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the mind building these cradles of protection. The problem begins when we believe they’re real and forget we’re inside one.
That’s when belief starts masquerading as truth.
Belief does not equal truth. In fact, the stronger our belief, the less we see. The more we cling, identify, defend, and perform, the narrower our vision becomes. Belief hardens into a thing. And things, block the view.
Things pretend to be solid. They look self-contained. But they are designations — temporary labels slapped onto dynamic processes. What we call a thing is usually just the visible tip of an interdependent, interdynamic iceberg beneath.
Take any object. A chair.* A body. A flag. Reduce it to atoms. Then reduce those atoms to subatomic particles. Many of those don’t even behave like tangible matter. Even protons and neutrons dissolve into stranger, less graspable components. With each reduction, solidity fades into pure energy.
The Buddha taught that there is no independent, permanent thing. No thingness, you might say.
Time tells the same story. The chair I’m sitting on feels solid enough. But it’s degrading as I write this. It was once a seedling, then a tree, then lumber, then furniture. One day it will be firewood, ash, soil. Compared to the age of the planet, its entire existence is a flicker.
Everything is in flux. And yet we try and freeze the flux by singling out a parcel and gripping to it with all our might. We turn movement into identity.
“I’m a good son.”; “I’m the black sheep.”; “I’m a patriot.”; “I’m progressive.”; “I’m conservative.”; “I’m spiritual.”
I’m a Buddhist.
But even that is a box if I think it makes me something. In fact, there is nothing to hold on to with any certainty. We crawl into these psychological enclosures and call them reality. We defend them. We argue from inside them. We build whole lives around them. And because we believe them, they feel solid.
But belief does not equal truth.
The more tightly we hold a belief, the more it becomes an obstruction. It filters out contradiction. It edits complexity. It reduces the living world to manageable pieces. It trades reality for control.
Here’s something unsettling: what’s most real might not be identifiable things at all. It might be the space between them.
In a live talk, I sometimes ask students to shout out everything they see in the room. They call out the ceiling, the lights, the cushions, the walls, the other people. Then I ask: what is most prevalent here? What is most prevalent, by far?
Space.
There is more space in the room than anything else. More space between objects. More space within objects. More space between atoms. More space inside the atom itself. If you include the space between things and the space inside those things, space dwarfs everything. There is more dark matter, and (thusfar) unknowable space in space.
And yet, everything is born from space.
Everything we see, and believe to be real, is only makeup on space. Yet, we don’t notice space. We notice surfaces. And from those surfaces we build belief systems. We construct narratives. We freeze dynamic reality into slogans and identities.
We do this personally. We do this politically. We do this culturally.
Nations are not fixed. Political movements are not fixed. Generations are not fixed. Every “how it is” is already unraveling into what it isn’t. Each new wave of voters arrives with a different nervous system, different media diet, different mythology. What continues isn’t permanence. It’s momentum.
Yet we cling as if the box will hold forever.
We rarely notice how we slide from one enclosure to the next. Somehow we move from curious children into solid, themed adults without recognizing the transition. We inherit boxes. We decorate them. We defend them. We mistake them for ourselves.
We do this because boxes feel safe.
The first step toward freedom isn’t smashing them. It’s noticing them. The second step is seeing that they have no solid walls.
If nothing is fixed, how do I stand? If identity is fluid, who am I? If beliefs are provisional, what anchors me?
But emptiness doesn’t mean nothing exists. It means nothing exists independently or permanently. Everything arises in relationship. Everything depends on everything else. That’s interdependence.
Subjectively, this can feel like release. An opening. A loosening of tension. In Buddhist language, it points toward Nirvana — not annihilation, but the end of clinging. The end of defending the box as if your life depends on it.
Between the boxes lies space. And space feels dangerous because space is undefended. It’s exposed. There’s no script in space. No ready-made identity. No tribe guaranteeing your place. Just awareness without enclosure.
We crave that openness. You can feel it when your life starts to itch. When the role you’ve been playing gets tight. When the identity that once felt powerful now feels like a costume. So, we long to step out. We read saying like “life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” Sounds good, but stepping into space feels naked.
And this rings the alarm of our defenses. The protective systems in our mind resist it. They tighten the walls. They reinforce the story. They tell you that outside the box is chaos, threat, annihilation. But maybe it’s freedom. Maybe it’s the annihilation of an older purpose. And like every form of life since there was life, maybe old purposes give way to new life.
So the real question isn’t whether boxes exist. They do. The mind will keep building them. The question is whether you know you’re in one.
Are you defending yourself? Or are you defending the box? Are you believing a story? Or, are you watching the story from a vantage of clear seeing? Because be boxes — in that uncomfortable, undefended space — is the possibility of something far more alive than certainty.
And that’s terrifying.
And liberating.
- *The late Sir Harold Pinter wrote an exchange between 2 brothers: The older brother Teddy, who is a Philosophy Professor, patronizingly tells Lenny, a streetwise pimp, to “take a chair”. “I prefer to Stand”, Lenny declines and then asks Teddy why philosophers are always saying things like “take a chair”. But once you’ve taken it, then what?
- Lenny goes on the defensive and says Lenny operates “in” things, but he, the philosopher, operates “on” things. This is an explanation of in and out of the box. Lenny, we find our in Act 3, is simply in a larger, more insidious, box.
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