Living in Spacce

“I just have so much to do I just don’t have any time to do what I really want to do.”

- Kilee Johnson
Living in Space

Kilee lives a very busy life.  She works full time, owns a home, is married, has a couple of pets, grows a large vegetable garden and loves to quilt.  It seems as if she is always working on a project.  In fact, she is the closest thing to a perpetual motion generator I’ve ever seen.  I see her fairly regularly; she’s also my daughter.  When I talked with her last, she was gasping for breath because she was also doing me a favor and it took her longer than she had anticipated.

“I just have so much going on!” She said as we talked on the phone.  “I don’t have time to do what I really want to do.”

“That’s because you always fill your schedule with projects to do.” I replied.  “You know, you don’t have to do everything you’re doing?”

As I listened to her reply I realized that Kilee suffers from a mistaken belief that emptiness is the same thing as nothingness.  For some reason our society has come to think that, “we are what we do” and “we are nothing else.”  This means that for millions of us, space does not exist.

But, nothing could be farther from the truth.  I go out into the night and look up in the sky and I can see space filled with stars.  I stand on my deck looking out to the South and see that there is space between my neighbor’s house and mine.  I look around me and see that there is space between my body and the body of others.  I look inside my home and see that there is an empty, space, room where Kilee used to live.  All these things have allowed me to realize that without space we would have no options.  There would be no new possibility.

Emptiness is everything – all possibilities of existence and nonexistence occurring simultaneously!  It is our nature to live in emptiness.  We have just forgotten that plain and simple fact.  So, I said something important to Kilee.

“You need to create space in your life; you don’t need to do everything you’re doing.  Don’t fill your life to the point where there is nothing else that can fit.  If you continue to live without emptiness, the possibilities you have seen in your dreams cannot come into your life.  There won’t be room for them!”

The words left my mouth to my own ears!  “I need to live in space myself!  In fact, I think I’m going to start by dusting off my space suit.  I haven’t seen it for a long time and I’ve been missing the wonders of the universe as a result!”

Do you know where your space suit is?