When There's Nothing Left to Solve

By Brea Segger

One of the things I've been noticing over the years is how rarely people experience spaciousness.

It's interesting because almost everyone tells me they want more of it. More time. Less pressure. Less rushing from one thing to the next. They imagine that once work settled down, or the children became more independent, or life simply demanded a little less from them, they'd finally have room to breathe.

The thing is, spaciousness does arrive.

It just rarely arrives all at once.

It appears in ordinary moments. A meeting finishes earlier than expected. A quiet Saturday morning. A drive home without needing to make another phone call. An afternoon where there isn't anything urgent asking for your attention.

I've become interested in how quickly those moments disappear.

Before we've really noticed them, we've usually filled them with something else.

Sometimes it's another task. Sometimes it's planning what's next. Sometimes it's picking up the phone for no particular reason. Most of the time it isn't even a conscious decision. We simply move towards whatever comes next.

I've done that often enough myself that I recognise it almost immediately.

For a long time I thought I was looking for certainty. I imagined that if I could work out what came next, I'd feel more settled. Looking back, I'm not sure certainty was ever what I was looking for.

What felt uncomfortable wasn't the lack of answers.

It was the space that existed before they arrived.

I've started wondering if we've become so accustomed to responding to life's demands that we don't quite know what to do when they ease.

Many of the people I work with have spent years becoming remarkably capable. They're good at solving problems. They make difficult decisions. People rely on them. They know how to keep life moving.

Those qualities build careers, families and businesses.

They don't necessarily teach us how to be with an hour that doesn't ask anything of us.

That's a very different experience.

I don't think spaciousness is something we find once and then hold onto.

I think it visits us in small, ordinary ways throughout the week.

A cancelled appointment.

A conversation that ends earlier than expected.

Ten quiet minutes before everyone else wakes up.

Most of those moments pass almost unnoticed.

People spend years trying to create more space in their lives.

Then, when it quietly arrives, they hardly recognize it.