Open Space
If you’re observing the Milky Way from the Southern hemisphere, the backdrop behind the spiraling arm of our galaxy is lit up, because you’re looking inward at the galactic spiral, towards the bright center of its coalescence.
But if you’re in the Northern hemisphere, you see the darkness of space behind the spiraling arm of star clusters, as you look outward into the open cosmos.
And so during a recent camping trip, under a thick canopy that prompted me to wander away from the crackling fire to find a large enough break above-head to be able to stargaze, I noticed that imposing darkness behind the milky way.
That vast blackness means something — it means a lot actually.
It’s from such a void that any meaningful creation emanates — moments, events, byproducts — from nebulae to bacterium to our own ideas and ambitions.
It’s from any apparent nothing that something, or everything, springs.
The spaces around a reference point are just as critical to the overall narrative relative to that point, even if those spaces themselves have yet to materialize into anything worthwhile. This is simply because the empty space represents potential — open possibility — never really meaning much until bookended by the more notable data points.
Temporally, it’s the same situation as it is physically — spaces between things make it possible for those things to be [to be felt, heard, seen, sensed]; likewise, temporal spaces between events make it possible for those events to be realized.
The habitable zone around a host star; the weeded and fertile soil of a garden; the quiet calm after chaos; the downtime after a victory; the thirst before, or the satiation after, consumption.
It’s a commonly articulated law of nature, whether it ties into the idea that everything seeks to expand and grow more complex, or whether it bleeds into notions of entropy or polarity, the dichotomy between positive (filled) and negative (unfilled) space is one that evidences certain clues about the fundamental nature of our reality.
Because it’s our reality, our surrounding space, that means something to us as the dynamic reference points we are.
A Kinetic Dichotomy
The dichotomy itself may need some more emphasis.
Negative spaces are inactive; uncharged; dark; empty; they’re the voids around the things; they’re the time between events; they’re ultimately static.
Positive spaces are active; charged; light or lit up; filled; they’re the things within the voids; they’re the events between time; they’re ultimately dynamic.
It’s a kinetic dichotomy of doing and being, action and inaction, yin-yanging itself into a homeostatic symbiosis with one half being more palpable, like a charge, and the other being more conductive, like a conduit.
Empty space, while not really empty (a truism by now thanks to quantum physics), invokes some kind of being or doing. It exists to be filled.
Like a backdrop or a canvas, the space makes the picture not only visible but possible.
Whether that space actually represents a lack of something, or a possibility of something more is another story — this is where perspective begins to emerge as a crucial variable.
Buoyant Dynamism
Building on that dichotomy, we can begin to appreciate how positive and negative spaces interweave, and how meaning is generated from their interaction—often from the bottom up as much as from the top down.
Our experience through space and time is always volatile; we typically spend as much time riding the highs as we do the lows — though some of us may be fortunate or prescient enough have a balance skewed in the right way.
And it doesn’t take us long to learn that true fulfilment comes not from enjoying the views from atop the peaks, or from doing only what’s comfortable, but from climbing up from the depths of struggle.
In other words, we know that it’s a folly to always force happiness; we know that we can’t swim against the currents of fate.
Understanding this dynamism, and flowing with it as opposed to rigidly forcing one outcome over another, generates a salient aloofness that maintains our maneuverability.
While it may be ironic, it’s not surprising that the more we’re accepting of the lows, the better we get at climbing out of them. The more we fear them or the more we clutch to the highs, the more impactful our inevitable fall becomes.
The trick, it seems, is to maintain the dynamism — to remain non-committal to fate, while remaining wholly committed to our immersion within it.
Such is the nature of our observable reality anyway.
Often, such spaces aren’t desirable. But they may lead to the desirable. They’re the journey point. It’s why Sisyphus smiles.
They are, in essence, the very potent opportunity that we seek.
Transmissions [and the signaler] versus Receptions [and the observer]
Under a certain kind of light, these words themselves are simply pedantic strings of thought caught up in a negative space — noise with little to no consequence.
But when we account for our operational perspective, everything changes.
To the right perceiver, with the right optics and the right circumstances, negative space represents open possibility.
On the other hand, in the wrong case, empty space can mean scarcity or the a kind of baron and hopeless hollowness.
In other words, reception (perception) is just as critical as transmission.
Like everything, it ultimately depends on perspective. Left or right hemispheres of the brain, Northern or Southern hemispheres of the planet, rising or setting suns.
The matter by which perception is filtered means everything.
All this to say that the negative spaces in life — those we deem inactive, inconsequential, unproductive, irrelevant, dark or empty — they may mean a whole lot more than we’d have ever imagined.