Welcome to Hope Sparks. I write for people standing at thresholds—the uncomfortable edges where who you’ve been meets who you’re becoming. The places where you know something needs to shift, but you’re not quite ready to let go of what’s kept you safe.
The rooms all feel different. Ever so slightly.
It has been seven days since my journey to Japan. I keep walking into my own kitchen and taking a second glance on what’s changed. The light on the counter striping the surface. The dust on the top of the cupboard I never look at. The chair I usually drop my bag onto without registering that I am dropping my bag onto a chair. I thought it was jet lag at first. It is not jet lag. Something is integrating. Slowly. And the integration has a texture I can feel in my shoulders. Soft. Spacious. A little uncanny. Like the familiar made strange by having been gone from it for a while.
You know the feeling? You change your context hard enough and then you come back, and the place you have lived for years suddenly shows you what was always there.
What was always there, for me, was how little space I had been keeping in the between moments.
Our Aesthetics Japan trip was a crucible. Ten days of new rooms, new circumstances, a small group of eight people, plans that bent, and situations I had not pictured and could not control. Travel does this. It heats you up, and it brings the material to the surface. Then, there you are, holding it, with whatever tools you happened to pack.
The tool I had been carrying, the one I want to talk about, is something I have started calling collaborating with reality. Not a technique. Mmmm closer to a stance. In how we meet moments as they come. Like when something unanticipated happens during a day, we are not meeting the day, we are insisting it should have been the other day. Collaborating with reality is the small, unglamorous move of putting the protest down. Not pretending the thing is fine. Not deciding to feel positive about it. Just agreeing, plainly: this is here. Now what.
Our first morning in Kyoto did not go the way we had hoped.
We had built the day carefully, Charlie’s curation, the right person to open the city for our small group. What we got instead was a guide more interested in his own forty years in Japan than in the city itself. Nothing was ruined. Nobody was harmed. It just was not the morning we had pictured. Charlie and I noticed our moods drop in real time. Small calculations starting up. You know, the wish that it could be different. Then we paused. Took that space. We looked at each other and we said, well, can’t do anything about it. The protest was using more of our energy than the morning itself. We put it down.
That was the practice. That was the whole practice. There was no resolution. The morning was just a little different from what we had planned. We stopped paying interest on it and went on with the day.
Japan kept handing me chances like this one. Underneath each one, the same question. Am I going to argue with what has arrived, or am I going to work with it?
Then, somewhere in the middle of all that, Japan gave me a word.
Ma.
Ma (間) is the space between things. The pause in a piece of music. The gap between two stones in a garden. The interval before a bow is finished. The breath a chef takes before placing the next piece of fish. It’s not emptiness. It is the active space that gives a form its meaning. Take it away and the music collapses into noise, the garden into rocks, the meal into food.
What struck me was not the definition. It was the rhythm.
Japan keeps a different time. Real attention on the in-between. The approach to the temple is treated as part of the temple. The pace of the meal is treated as part of the meal. The pause before the next thing is not dead air to be crossed quickly, it is part of the thing itself. I found this a sincere contrast to Western culture’s tendency. To keep our eyes on the shiny object at the end. The result. The destination. The finished version. Japan keeps its attention on the spaces between the shiny objects, and somehow the spaces are where the meaning turned out to be living the whole time.
My favourite composer (of our times) Max Richter said something once about his work that has stayed with me. He sees music, he said, as a way of making inquiries into the world. A diary. A script of the things you are going through. A way of processing your own experiences. I listen to him when I need to stop my mind, when I need whatever has been rustling underneath to come up rather than be managed back down. His music is built on Ma. The held notes. The space between them. The interval is not the wait before the next note. The interval is the note. The thing that lets the melody mean anything at all.
And here is where the two threads of this trip braided together for me.
Collaborating with reality, I realised, is not a willpower move. It is a rhythm move. You cannot put the protest down if there is no gap between what arrived and your reaction to it. The email lands and you are already answering. The guide starts talking and you are already calculating the damage. The morning does not go your way and you are already three steps into compensating for it. No gap. No Ma. No room to notice you are arguing, let alone to choose something else.
Ma is not just a beautiful aesthetic idea.
Ma is the small clearing inside which presence becomes possible at all. Without it, every other practice you might want to have is happening on top of a nervous system that has no room to absorb it.
I write a lot about big moves. Pivots. Transformations. Thresholds. I believe in them. I have crossed several myself and I walk beside people crossing theirs.
And here is what I keep noticing. The people who make the big moves well are not the ones who burned the calendar down to do it. They are the ones who had built small doors first.
The big move and the small door are not opposites. The small door is what makes the big move possible. It is the rhythm underneath the change. It is the breath you take so that when the next thing arrives, you have somewhere inside yourself to meet it from.
You may be working toward a big move. Heck, you may be inside one right now. You may be sitting with the fact that the move you thought you wanted is not quite the move anymore. Wherever you are, the small door comes first. It always comes first. You shape Ma with your hands. Applying gentle space in the life you already have. And from inside that rhythm you can hear what is actually being asked of you next.
On the second-to-last day of the trip, I stepped away from the group. Heeding a desire to be solo. Not in a dramatic way, not because anything had broken, just because I had a signal and it was nudging for space. So, I found a booklined coffee shop with a perch by the window and I sat there for a couple of hours, alone. And I watched Kyoto move. People going about their Tuesday. A man arranging flowers in a doorway. Bicycles. Schoolchildren.
Nothing happening, really. Everything happening.
In that space I let the subtle message come. I’m married to a wonderful extrovert. Charlie is in his natural state a high-current person, alive to everyone in the room, and for many years I have made myself as available to that current as my little self will allow. I match. I rise. I stay alongside his energy because I love him and because being alongside him is one of my favourite places to be. And in Japan, with ten days of people and no quiet country morning to recover into, I saw my lack of space for me. I needed two hours to sit and percolate. I needed a small door in the middle of a life I would not change.
That coffee shop was not a break from the trip. The coffee shop was the trip doing its real work in me.
This is what I mean by the discipline of the small door.
The door is small because the life is (sometimes) full. You are not going to take a sabbatical this week. You may not clear your calendar. You are probably not going to make any structural change at all today. Most of us, most days, are inside a room we have chosen and would choose again, and the question is not how to get out.
The question is how to breathe inside it. Consider.
A few small doors I have been practising. Try one. Try another tomorrow.
The breath before the reply. Read the email. Close the laptop. Walk to the kitchen, fill a glass of water, drink it. Then come back and answer. The water is the Ma. The answer that comes after will not be the one you would have sent in the first three seconds.
One song between things. Pick a piece of music. Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight is the obvious answer and also the right one. Listen here. Play it once, fully, before the next thing on your calendar. Not as background. As the thing. Notice what surfaces in those eight minutes.
The walk before the decision. Any decision that feels charged. Do not make it from the chair. Stand up. Walk for the length of the song or the length of the block. Decide from the body, not from the desk.
None of these are going to change your life. That is the point. They are not designed to. They are designed to put a small door in a wall that did not have one, so that whatever has been rustling in you has somewhere to come up.
You work with how you work with the circumstances rather than think that if you went on the right road, if you made the right decision, you could avoid all that.” - Pema Chodron
Pema’s teaching reminds us to stop struggling against reality or chasing the illusion of a “perfect” path that avoids all pain. Instead, true peace comes from how we relate to and navigate the actual situation we find ourselves in.
I am going to be in a room with this in June, leading a session built entirely around it, because I cannot stop thinking about it. But I did not want to wait until June to say it out loud. It is not really a workshop idea. It is a life tool. It is the thing Japan kept teaching me, in every room, with every door that took its time to close.
What is the small space you have not been taking?
With love and attention, xo Hope
