Another storm rolled in this morning; I was at the gym watching as the snow coated the parking lot and my little blue car as I ran on the treadmill, rowed on the rower and hefted dumbells below and above my head. I always take the Sunday morning class, because it’s longer and “more brutal” than all the other classes the gym offers— something I both believe and don’t. Can a half hour more of a treadmill, rowing machine and weights really make that much of a difference?
This, coming from the person who couldn’t finish the intervals on the treadmill today. We did hill sprints (fast speeds on an incline) earlier in the week, and in my haste to push myself to the max, I landed on my left foot incorrectly and it’s been sore ever since. Halfway through today’s intervals, what was just a “sore” foot turned into an impossibly painful one that scared me into modifying my workout to exclude hard impact.
(The trials of living life in your 40s.)
Yet, the snow continued to fall and I wondered if I’d make it back up the hill to my house. Even though only a few inches had collected on top of the icy pavement, it doesn’t take much snow to slow down a Honda Fit. I learned that this past New Year’s Eve when, also returning home from the gym, my car nearly slipped into the ditch as it struggled up the hill to the old house.
On the way home, I cursed at the driver in front of me who was only going 10 mph in his four-wheel drive Ford Bronco. If I hadn’t hurt my foot, even I can run that fast! I knew there was no chance for me if I couldn’t add at least another bit of power. After all, the last way I wanted to spend my Sunday morning was stuck in a snowy ditch.
Yet, miracles happen: the Bronco turned off the main road, and I accelerated just enough to make it up the hill, down the rutted dirt road (which felt more like willful careening than driving) and finally to the single-lane dirt road to the house where I was more than grateful to park my little car in the garage.
Winter space.
The white space.
A space of the unknown.
*
In 2010, I wrote an essay about whiteness and snow following my first semester in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California. It was a quiet piece (I would argue that all pieces of writing that contain snow have a quietness to them) that was really about my unhappiness and isolation in my relationship at the time, in which I was trying to find myself while unable to navigate the world because of all the snow. Back then, I called Tahoe City “home,” and the man in my life then drove me everywhere I needed to go. He brought me lunch at the small boutique inside the small mall where I worked. And every night, he drove us home in his big, 4WD SUV. He cooked dinner for us both and measured it out on my plate so I wouldn’t eat too much. And then, he would switch us both to a fat-free raw and vegan diet until the lack of protein made his joints ache too much. So, we went back to eating salmon.
On the surface, it was an essay about two people living in the mountains when it snows; but the long quietness, that was the point of it.
One scene, blocked off by margins and white space when he “looked” at me when he came to get me at a local coffeehouse where he’d left me hours before. He had dropped me off with my laptop and told me to work on my writing while he went back to the marina where he would once again shovel the docks free of snow. When he came back— hours later than he said he would— I was drinking a glass of wine and not a mug of coffee. There were no words between us, but that look. The disappointment fell like the snow outside, as he watched me change into a person who did not want to be controlled and who held the power to be endlessly disappointing. Or, endlessly myself.
My graduate advisor in the MFA program loved that essay.
It is homage to the power of the white space, she had told me.
*
Transformation often happens when we cannot see the path ahead, and when uncertainty demands something of us that was not there before. Nestled deep. I have never feared the whiteness of a blank page—or a blank screen—staring back at me. This is odd, coming from a person who is an introvert, and made uneasy by things most people consider a matter of course: phone calls, press conferences, conversations— these interactions when my introverted soul takes a deep breath and prays for the best before stepping into the light.
It is not like that with my words and the page. As a kid, I wrote my feelings to myself in letters and journals because it was something that came naturally to me. When my little sister moved from baby to toddler to kid, I wrote out my grievances to her for unacceptable actions in letters that were not unlike formal complaints. I’m eight years older than she is— and I guess I thought this was the best way to approach things. I laugh, thinking about this now. Shouting, shoving— those were for the basest of humanity. I decided, even at the age of 12, that my emotions were best served in the container of language and thought, written out in a letter, with an introduction, a formal complaint and polite, if clipped, closing.
This didn’t last long. Confused—she wasn’t able to read yet— she asked one of our parents to read this long missive back to her. Unfortunately, she asked for help from the least understanding one, and I was punished. My stepparent found me in my room where he pushed the page with my words into my face so hard I fell back into my bed, suffocating under the paper that was being held tight against my face, where my tears and snot smeared the ink across my face.
After that, I stopped writing my emotions out for other people to read. That wouldn’t come back to me until my twenties when the desire to write—impossibly everything— forced me to lift that smothering memory from not only my face, but my entire sense of self, and to feel what exactly that would mean.
That happened when I lived in a house without central heat across from the University campus on winter break when I was 20 years old. That was the first winter of not going home. The student who lived there during the academic semester— a girl I worked with in the library— asked if I would house-sit for her while she went home for the holidays. She warned me about the cold, about the halfway house next door and the men that sometimes gathered in the driveway to smoke. I looked out the wide front window with frost forming around its corners on the inside watching the men and the cold, dark scene outside, intent on writing it the way David Sedaris or David Eggers might.
All that white: the snow, the silence, the frost: but never—not for me— the page. I filled page after page, while eating peanut butter on the tips of baby carrots with hands that shook from the absolute cold, grateful for this space and that I was—finally—writing.
*
There is power in the margins. It is the power of possibility.
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself— I’ve assumed that “white space” or even “margins” is a common term. It might not be. When I say “white space” I am referring to the place on a page or a screen in which there are no words. This could be the margins of the page. In prose writing, this is also the space that is allowed between sections of text.
A piece of writing is said to be “dense” when there is a felt lack of this. When the ideas or a sheer number of words themselves (or both!) create an atmosphere of “smothering” so the reader feels as though there is no place for them in the text— no place to breathe! Adding physical space into a piece of writing is an editing technique that can literally work wonders.
It is a trick many online “content creators” use: the last thing anyone wants to see on a website is a dense block of words. So you write sparsely and introduce A LOT of space. This can make reading on a screen palatable, and digestible. Or, that can alleviate that initial sense of panic of “I don’t want to read all of this!”
It is also a concept in the coaching sphere that I employ often, both as a Soul-Based Coach and as an editor and writing coach. It is an appreciation and acknowledgment that transformation and change have their own pace and logic (or illogic). It is a gesture to the power held within both space and time. The more we move toward or away from something, the more we can gain perspective, distance or proximity, that we can claim it or let it go.
Yet, we all need the space into which we can intuitively feel into which direction we need to go. Forward or back, closer or farther away. Holding space and letting go of outcomes are both forms that honor the pauses, the silence and margins in our own lives.
*
Sometimes I wonder if what I offer clients is only that: permission to exist in the margins. In the “white space” between the words, the story, the ongoing narrative that runs nonstop across our lives. In inviting the margins, we invite unexpected guests who have much to teach us:
To not know.
To move forward and back.
The mystery.
Although snow mutes the world, it also amplifies the bark of trees and branches. The circling eagle in the white, clouded, sky. Shadows cast in paw-prints in the dampening snow. The power of fragility like feathers: delicate yet capable of flight. What is not is just as present as what is. Mystery, and not-knowing are subtle reminders of the way in which are connected to the world.
For storytellers, the silence tells a story, too. What is not said, omitted— the interval between this and that… that is where the meaning lies.
The next time you write—whether it’s a poem, story, blog post, social media caption or some other missive, I encourage you to experiment with the silence, the intimate knowing contained within space itself.
You might be surprised.