Brain Food #868: Occupying the negative space

Many of you may be currently planning or already taking a summer break, creating space for a new chapter to unfold on your return—perhaps more room in the mind for fresh ideas, or the energy to carry on with life’s larger and smaller projects.

To some, this may feel uncomfortable at first, inducing feelings of guilt or inadequacy. As with all clichés, there is truth in what Josef Pieper wrote in Leisure: The Basis of Culture: “Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.”

And so, empty spaces in our calendars can make us anxious, much like the eerie quality of empty rooms or roads. We tend to have an aversion to silence and space, identifying our worth only in what is, and not what isn’t. Wired to lean towards the comfort of productivity, we perceive empty spaces as negative.

In art, negative space frames the subject, or primary object, while the area occupied by the primary object is referred to as positive space. Primary objects exist within the positive space and become the focal point because of the negative space around them. In other words, negative space leads to a positive perspective. It can help us see what might be otherwise overlooked if the canvas is too busy.

Life in its broader shape may also contain negative spaces—points of stuckness, where nothing substantial happens, where it often feels like you are cycling on a stationary bike, trying to move forward.

In these moments, it is tempting to want to just switch on the light, as David Lynch said, for the negativity and darkness to go away. But we need the spaces, even the negative ones, for life to work, for the positive to come into the foreground.

When those periods in between occur, whether voluntary or not, they are moments between stories, an essential part of the whole. Philosopher Alan Watts described them as a form of necessary silence, even if our attention tends to drift towards the noise:

“the general habit of conscious attention is, in various ways, to ignore intervals. Most people think, for example, that space is “just nothing” unless it happens to be filled with air.
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Because of this habit of ignoring space-intervals, we do not realise that just a sound is

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