The Space Between Us

While we were on vacation last week, my wife picked up a book entitled To Bless the Space Between Us, by John O’Donoghue.  It is an exquisite little book of blessings, for an enormous variety of life situations.  While the book itself deserves a post of its own, the expression “the space between us” strikes me as enormously important.

"Honoring the space between us" is a key task of the human life.  The trick is to stay connected to others, but not fused with them.  Be emotionally connected to someone else, but recognize and respect the space between the two of you.  "Honoring the space between" allows each of you to maintain your individuality; the "staying connected" prevents you from being cut off from each other.

Our anxious culture far too easily equates "loving someone" with "doing whatever that person wants."  In this way of thinking, ‘loving someone’ comes to mean ‘to please the person and make him or her happy.’ Once we fall into this trap, we collapse the space and any difference between us, we merge with the other person, and that becomes a very problematic place to be.

It is not really love when one person has to suppress his or her disagreement with another.  It is not truly kind when you withhold your best thinking from someone close to you.  This is a phony peace and an artificial niceness that can never last long.

When we honor the space between us, we stay connected to each other, but we can also allow others the freedom to disagree with us.  When we honor the space between us, we share our own best thinking with others, even when our thinking may not be what others want to hear.  And if others get upset with us because of our different thinking, we give them the freedom to get upset with us and remain connected to them, praying for them, wanting the best for them.

I don’t know about you, but I think this is difficult stuff.  In fact, I would say that this is the hardest stuff there is.  In some ways it is much easier to fuse with others and do whatever they want.  That way, you don’t have to think for yourself.  And it can be much easier to cut off from others and to keep as far away from them as you can.  That way, you just don’t have to deal with their messy feelings and their upset.  But “blessing the space between us” offers us a more excellent way to love others and to love ourselves.