The most important part of making space is listening. No matter how you are trying to make space, you first have to learn to listen. You have to listen to yourself, and you have to listen to the other people in the space.
If you haven’t already read Part 1 of my Make Space series, I highly suggest you go back and read it first. That’s where I have explained what it is I mean by “make space” and where I begin to flesh out how I conceptualize it.
While most of us learn how to listen as young children, we often forget that it’s actually a skill we can and should practice. Usually we default to surface-level listening. We only passively hear the information that is pertinent to us in that moment, and disregard the rest. Only rarely do we venture into active listening or deep listening. With active listening, as the name suggests, you are actively paying attention to what you’re hearing: it becomes your focus. With deep listening, you bring additional attention to what it is you’re listening to, beyond how it immediately relates to and impacts you.
Listening Inwards
First, let’s examine the inner iterations of making space. This is when you yourself feel like you’re being crowded, be it by your physical surroundings, your own thoughts, or your emotions.
Physical Space
I know that listening to your physical space sounds a little strange, but bear with me. The important part of a space isn’t actually how it looks, but how it feels. No matter how aesthetically pleasing a room is, if it isn’t set up to be functional for how you need to use it, then it’s always going to feel difficult to be there.
Sometimes this is a matter of rearranging the setup of your space. I am personally a complete dud when it comes to arranging furniture. My strategy has become multiple rounds of rearranging until the space feels welcoming and comfortable, which is how I prefer my spaces to feel. I have also found that (shockingly) using tips from design principles like feng shui is a helpful starting point. Mostly, though, I have to listen to my feelings after trial and error. Also make sure your furniture works for you: that your desk isn’t too high, that your chair isn’t too short, etc.
Other times, it’s more of an issue of how you’re using the space. Humans associate places with the actions we typically perform there. This is why it can be hard to work from home if you haven’t before, or why sleep experts recommend only using your bed/bedroom for sleep activities. If you’re tight on space, you might have to figure out how to categorize and group activities and areas. Additionally, you could figure out a way to slightly alter the space for each activity by using different lighting, for example, or even just sitting in a slightly different spot.
Thought Space
Your thought space is influenced by your physical space, but not only by that. Our thoughts are also the patterns we give them. Similar to remapping physical spaces for what you want to use them for, you have to remap your thought space if you want to make any changes there. If you’re used to thinking about things from a certain angle, that is how your brain will default to thinking. If you try thinking from a different angle, things will look different.
Let’s take a concrete metaphor of shifting perspective. If you’ve ever moved to a different neighborhood in the same city, you probably have experienced this phenomenon: nothing about the city itself has changed, but your center of reference has shifted. With this shift, locales can feel and even look different. Places that used to be convenient are no longer so, and new places have become more important. You may at some point realize that you haven’t even been down the street you used to live on in months or years — that street that used to center your lived experience. This is the equivalent change that has to happen if you want to recenter your thought space.
Recentering and Diversifying Your Thought Space
Unfortunately, you can’t up and move your self to a different part of your brain. But, stepping back, why might you want to go through the struggle of strengthening other neural pathways? Even if you’re happy with how you think right now, you would probably derive some benefit from experimenting with other ways of thinking. It’s part of over-specialization: anyone who exercises seriously knows the dangers of overworking one part of the body. Focus too much on your quads and not enough on your hamstrings, and you risk injury to your knees and lower back. Focus on only your abs and not on your back, and your whole body can be pulled out of balance. Think one way for too long, and you’ll forget the existence and validity of other perspectives.
If, on the other hand, you know that there’s some thinking adjustments that you would like to make, your way forward is more clear. No easier, unfortunately, but more clear. Knowing where you want to end up helps to outline the path you’ll have to take. Just remember that goals don’t have to be set in stone: if, as you’re working on making your adjustments, you discover a new goal, you shouldn’t feel pressured to stay with your original destination. As you move and change, it’s perfectly reasonable for your goals to change too.
What the Heck Are Other Ways of Thinking?
Now you might be saying to yourself, hey Emory, cool metaphors, but I still have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s ok. (And thank you for calling my metaphors cool.) Thinking about thinking is kind of weird, and we don’t do that very much. Our thoughts happen how they happen, and that’s that.
I think the most approachable method is to try thinking about things from someone else’s perspective. How do you think your friend, your coworker, your great-grandma, or your future self would think about things? How would you think about things if you lived somewhere else or were in a different personal situation? Try listening to your inner dialogue like it’s someone else speaking, and see how that changes how you feel about it.
Emotional Space
I struggled for a bit on how to separate out emotional space from thought space. They’re both inside your head, aren’t they? They’re both using that intangible space, so how should I separate them — or should I at all?
Obviously, yes, I should. Your thoughts are not your emotions. Emotions are how you react to things, both internal thoughts and external events. You can think thoughts that you don’t agree with, or that you don’t believe. You can’t so much, say, feel emotions that you don’t agree with. In this way, there is an element of inherent personal truth to emotions. However, that doesn’t make them immutable. For instance, the things that made you incandescent with rage as a toddler probably now barely register on your emotional scale, because part of growing up is learning to manage your emotions, learning to manage how you react to things.
Listening To What You Feel
Listening to your emotions can be hard. It’s much easier to either just simply feel them, or to ignore them altogether. Listening to them means you both acknowledge what you’re feeling and why, while not being consumed by them. This takes patience. (Cool metaphor incoming!) It’s like learning bird calls. You can’t go outside and listen to the cacophony and miraculously know which sound belongs to which bird; you have to isolate the calls and learn how they attach to their owners. And just as a bird attracting a mate sounds different from one sounding the alarm, emotions will also feel different in different contexts. Feeling sad with friends is much different than feeling sad alone.
Note here that I’m neither advocating for not feeling your emotions at all, nor giving into them wholesale. Of those two extremes, our society tends to lionize the former and ridicule the latter. This has obvious sexist underpinnings (hysterical women!), but it also has elements of Colonial-style racism (which to be fair is generally paternalistic and therefore an offshoot of sexism).
Having emotions is part of being alive. Listening to them can enrich your life.
When Emotions Take Too Much Space
Emotions can be extremely weighty, though. Part of listening to your emotions is knowing when to stop: when you need to take a break from feeling all the things, when you need to take an emotional load off, when you need to take a step back from whatever is causing the emotions. For the most part, this is in the context of negative emotions, because (unfortunately) very few of us struggle with an excess of positive emotions.
If you’re in a constant struggle to survive, it’s really hard to set your stresses – your emotions – aside. They’re always there, all around, constantly rearing their heads when you least expect it. Learning how to listen when faced with this kind of situation is daunting: you aren’t listening to the lone sparrow chirping, you’re living in an aviary full of angry corvids. (Am I writing this while being yelled at by a bluejay? Why yes, yes I am. Both physically and cool metaphorically.) You have to learn how to make your own little space of calm, where you can just breathe, for your own health and sanity. Then, once you’re in a secure place, you can take those emotions out an deal with them.
Listening Outwards
Making space isn’t just about you, though. There are billions of people and only one planet — there has to be room for everyone here. And not just physical room, but also space of acceptance and comfort.
Many, if not most, societies are constructed on an exclusionary basis. You have to be the right kind of person to gain entry to the upper echelons, and if you aren’t, you receive fewer advantages. Even as we have developed incredible technologies that have the potential to feed, shelter, and clothe the whole world, we are still caught in a collective state of fear that we will suffer deprivations. Unfortunately, that fear isn’t unfounded: huge swathes of the world still struggle to survive, let alone thrive.
Emotions About Space
Objectively speaking, if someone has something that you too have — a phone, a sandwich, a friend —, your possession of that is not affected. If your coworker has the exact same model of phone as you do, that in no way impacts your phone or your ownership thereof. If you feel threatened by someone having what you have, it is because you perceive some advantage has been lost. Having better possessions, better opportunities, means that you have a leg up in the struggle for survival. You’re on a higher rung of the ladder. If someone else is on your same rung, you now have to fight them off too, right?
Except. What is that ladder? Why are we climbing it? What’s at the top? And why, even in a place where there is more than enough to go around, do we so often act like the only way we can survive is by taking food from the mouths of others? Why do we act like the only way to climb that ladder is by knocking someone else off?
How Wide is Your Ladder?
I don’t know what’s at the top of the ladder. (I don’t believe there is a top. As far as I can tell, it’s just an obstacle course invented by those who have more to occupy those who have less. /RANT) By calling it a ladder, people naturally assume that it is narrow, with only room for one person abreast, as actual ladders are. Therefore it would be reasonable to assume that, should you wish to progress, someone on a higher rung than you would be in your way.
This is only true if what you want is scarce, available only to a few. If you want to be head of a company, there is only the one spot. You gaining that position necessarily means that whoever is there now would have to move. However, this is not true if what you want is abundant. In that case, there is enough room on the ladder for others to be there without affecting you. This is doubly not true if it’s something immaterial.
Of course this idea brings up plenty of objections. Physical limitations do exist. What if there isn’t enough for everyone? What if what you want becomes more scarce? Valid objections. We have to then ask, why is it that people want whatever it is? Is it something fashionable, that they can point to to highlight how high they have climbed the ladder? Or is it something necessary to their survival?
Thought Space and Listening
As many other people have said before me, in more detail and with more elegance, the internet is both a blessing and a curse for communication. It’s true that we can now physically communicate with infinitely more ease, but we can also tailor with equal ease exactly with whom we communicate — or don’t. We can build bubbles for ourselves in which conversations are functionally the same as talking to ourselves, if we want.
Listening to Others
Communicating with other people is at once the most basic element of being a social being and also one of the most complicated. We can never truly know what is in another person’s mind. Every additional difference between you and your interlocutor creates another opportunity for miscommunication. Gender, race, age, social class, physical location, life experiences, and more introduce more chances that attempts at communicating will go awry. Moreover, each of these elements reduce the chance that you’ll be communicating at all.
But while we can only truly know ourselves based on what we have experienced, we can learn about other lived experiences by listening to the people experiencing them. And in learning about their lives, we can better communicate with them. We might then also learn more of what we don’t know, turning the unknown unknowns into known unknowns.
Think of language versus dialect. If someone is speaking a language that you don’t know, you can’t understand what they’re saying. Moreover, you know that you don’t understand them. However, if someone is speaking a different dialect of your same language, you might think you know what they’re saying, because you understand the words they are using. But dialects are built on different connotations, different syntaxes, different lived experiences. You don’t know that you’re talking past each other, because you don’t know you’re using different dialects.
Who is talking?
There is more to communicating than the simple words. There’s tone and body language, which we know are lost in written and virtual communications. Sarcasm, for instance, is infamously hard to convey not just in writing, but also across dialects.
Yet another element to consider when communicating with others is to listen to who is doing the talking. Are all parties sharing equally in the speaking time, or is one party dominating? If the latter, why? What is the context?
Make Space For Listening
It is unfortunately true that not everyone has an equal seat at the table. Further, those who have the most power believe it to be in their interest to maintain — and if possible, grow — that power. The more voice you have, the more you can advance your own interests. The more you can advance your own interest, the easier it is for you to live. The easier it is for you to live, the more space you have to breathe. The more space you have to breathe, the more you can use your voice.
The more you use your voice, the less you can listen.
One of the popular terms right now for people who have, shall we say, less room at the table, is marginalized. Marginalized people. People who have been pushed to the margins, who live on the margins, who have been marginalized. What’s fun about that phrase is that we pretend that “marginalized” is just something that happens, just a normal state of being, and not something that we cause. No Mom, I don’t know how the lamp got broken, it just fell off the table! No I don’t know how these people got pushed to the edge of society, it just happened!
We know why people are marginalized. It’s not a secret. They don’t fit the exact mold that those with the most power — the loudest voices — have decreed is The Right Mold. Remarkably, the Right Mold looks exactly like the people with the power.
Widening The Margins
One cool fact about marginalized people is that they’re human beings. They have thoughts and opinions just like non-marginalized people, just like all human beings. The difference is they don’t have the same platform as the non-marginalized, and certainly not the same institutionalized megaphone as those who hold the reins of power. They’re just cramped into the edges of society, where it’s easier for those in the center to ignore them. Therefore, if we widen the margins, we bring them closer to the center, make them harder to ignore.
We widen the margins by empowering those living on them. We empower them by listening to them. And in order to listen to them, they need the voice to be able to be heard, and the space to be understood. Not for someone to speak for them; while this brings them attention, which is a potential for a platform, it doesn’t actually give them power.
There is enough room for everyone if we make the space. There is enough room for everyone’s voices if we learn to listen. We are all equal in our shared humanity, and everything else is just window dressing.
And remember, friends, in a democracy, the ultimate expression of your voice – your power – is your vote. Make those in power listen to you. GO VOTE.
I’m going to call this post here. I know I have glossed over and skipped bits, but this isn’t a novel after all. Take care of yourself so that you can take care of others. Learn to listen to yourself so you know how to listen to others. Be a good person.
