By Maria Popova
It is the silence between the notes that distinguishes music from noise, the stillness of the soil that germinates the seeds to burst into bloom. It is in the gap of absence that we learn trust, in the gap between knowledge and mystery that we discover wonder. Every act of making space is in some sense a creative act and an act of faith. And yet in its open-endedness and indeterminacy, in its courtship of uncertainty, it challenges our most basic instincts about how to govern our lives, unsettling the foundation of our illusion of control (which is always the opposite of faith).
Italian writer Paola Quintavalle and artist Miguel Tanco offer a lovely antidote to our unease about this essential creative and contemplative act in Making Space (public library) — a charming illustrated taxonomy of the many forms of this existential exhale, the many ways we can deepen and magnify life by giving things beyond our control the time and space they take.
There is making space “to plant a seed and watch it grow,” space “for taking a chance” and “for another try,” space “for a hand to hold and when it’s time, for letting go.”
Children hold vigil over a dead bird, making space “for those who are no longer here.” A boy with a party hat and a mouthful of cake encircled by angry peers in party hats becomes an emblem of “the truth stuck inside your mouth.” A constellation of little cosmonauts make space “to wonder why.”
Page by page, there emerges a growing awareness that making space is really about our relationship to time and the unknown — that it is intimately related to learning how to wait better, that it is a laboratory for the paradoxes and possibilities of change, that it is where we come to terms with our necessary losses. (“Longing is like the Seed,” Emily Dickinson wrote, beholden to “the Hour, and the Zone, / Each Circumstance unknown.”)
Couple Making Space with Pablo Neruda’s beautiful poem “Keeping Quiet,” then revisit 200 years of beloved writers, artists, and scientists on the rewards of solitude, that supreme act of making space.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books