Room to Breathe

I left the big city of Nashville for a small town. I left a downtown skyline for the Lake Michigan shoreline. I gave away at least 95% of my possessions. People said things like, “But you could sell this and make money.” “Won’t you need some of these things?” “I don’t think I could let go of so many of my possessions.” 

I was ready to let everything go.  

I kept family heirlooms, but even a few of those didn’t make it through the move. I cried over my family popcorn bowl that broke. The red glassware my grandmother gifted me years before at my wedding all broke too. 

There’s always a cost where new life is possible. It’s a negotiation of tradeoffs. I wanted to get to my new life without delay. I wasn’t interested in making money off my stuff. I was a million dollars in medical debt but I didn’t want my new life to wait for a few bucks that would be a drop in the bucket anyway. I only wanted to invest in my new life.  I brought what was aligned with what I could see of my new life. New life cost me a LOT of my old life–very nearly all of it truthfully, but it paid off as this new life grew into something wonderful. Over the last 6 years, I haven’t missed a single thing that I let go in that purge. It made room for new richness in my life.

There are plenty of scientific principles about when a material is confined, it can only expand or grow until it reaches its mechanical limits, after which it will deform or break. Too much “holding on” or “holding in” causes staleness and stuckness and eventually deforms who we could be. Without space, mental or physical or emotional, there is no room for anything new. What “new” are we missing by being so full of the “old”?  

Is this why so many purge and organize in January? To make room for new? Is it about curing “stuckness?” Creating new possibilities? New jobs. New directions or interests. New relationships. None of us knows in advance what a new season brings. It’s got me thinking. It’s got me wondering. I’m curious.

This year, I want to deeply explore what we hold or carry and how that affects the “new” or lack of new that comes to us. I want to think about what we tell ourselves and how stories free or jail us. Where are our resources running low or have they ceased and we’re forced to go elsewhere for nourishment or inspiration? How we must “empty” ourselves to find the holy.

Transformation requires space. Some things have to leave to make room for that which is coming.

I so admire paintings that seem to hold expansive space or color. There’s quite a lot of sacrifice to that kind of work. Maybe it’s limiting the choice in the color palette or maybe it’s painting out or veiling parts of a painting that are lovely or interesting, but don’t serve the whole. What to love and leave vs. what to love and cover. What should stay and what should go. These are important choices I want to make very deliberately in my art and in my life.

I want to bring that to you here as well. Room to breathe and explore. Room to rest and be curious. Room to think about what we hold and carry and how that hurts or helps us. Who knows where that will lead us, but I’m ready to explore.