Is There Space For Me In Your Head?

Open Space (Photography by Bradford Chase)

We humans place great importance in creating boundaries that allow us to measure things. We just can’t seem to handle life without boundaries.

Time is an outstanding example. The concept of infinity removes the need to place constraints on time. If time is infinite, then measuring it only serves to carve out a small piece of endlessness so we can quantify it. I like to think man’s measurement of time is merely a feeble attempt to constrain something without beginning or end to give us a standard of past, present, and future to compare. From a purely logical standpoint, infinity means that any point in measured time is meaningless on the grand scheme of things.

This can constipate our mental facilities if we think about it for too long. But we measure time because we are finite beings living on an infinite timeline, so we need the ability to offer an answer when we think about an amount of time we’ve existed. It also gives us a good reason to have a party at least once a year, but I digress.

So, perhaps there is value in measuring time. But what about space?

Space also is meaningless in our infinite universe, but like time; I think there is a value to the concept of nothingness with us living on a finite planet. So, let’s explore space.

Think about how our world places importance on the number of things that take up physical space, but in doing so, misses out on tangible benefits offered by the large part of our surroundings that are full of nothing. How can something be full of nothing? Here comes some more mental gymnastics, but I promise the result is worth the exercise.

Let’s start with a picture like the one below.

As a creative artist, I learned early that a key aspect of photographs can be what we don’t see in the picture. A strange idea for certain, but look again at the distance between the wandering doe and the large tree.

Emptiness. Lots of nothing. Air. Open space.

But the emptiness is exactly what makes the scene more dramatic to observe. In photography, we call it negative space…