How I Learned to Be OK in an Empty Space

We crave space, but then rush to fill it. What’s up with that?

Renée Fishman
Jul 27, 2017 · 5 min read

I spent most of this past month engaged in a massive declutter project, the first step to getting my apartment ready to sell. I’ve spent a decade helping others sell their homes and I’ve been taking my own medicine: clearing things out, to make space for another person’s vision.

I went away last weekend while the apartment was painted, and I expected to return home to find it newly furnished with staging furniture. I returned home to a mess; the rental furniture was all wrong. We sent it back, and new furniture won’t arrive until next week.

My empty living room. July 27, 2017

So here I am, sitting in my mostly empty living room.

Even after a decade as a real estate broker, I never get over how different spaces look and feel without furniture. There’s a hollowness to them, usually.

As I survey the blank walls and the few pieces of my remaining furniture, I contemplate the space.

Space. It is the thing we crave more than anything. Moreso, even, than time. (Of course, time is just a form of space. But more on that another time.)

Especially in New York City, where we live in cramped boxes, travel on cramped subways, and fight for every inch of breathing room on the sidewalks, in restaurants, in supermarket aisles.

The predictability of the human desire for more space is what keeps real estate agents in business.

But a funny thing happens when we get the space we crave: we fill it.

We fill our physical space with furniture and clothes and books and toys. We fill our time space with busy work, activities, errands, web surfing, social media and email. We fill our mental space with news and information and other things we don’t need to know. We fill our emotional space with toxic emotions that drain our energy and our ability to focus on what’s truly important.

All of this leaves us no space for connecting with ourselves, nature and other humans in a meaningful way.

As I sit here, I can’t help but wonder whether we really do want the space we say we want.

What if more and bigger space isn’t really what we want? Or what if it is, but we just don’t know what to do when we receive it?

That which we most desire is also the thing we fear the most.

Fear may be a strong word in this context, kenophobia (fear of empty spaces) is a real thing. But, it certainly seems that many of us have a discomfort with empty spaces. We avoid at all costs being in a room, alone with ourselves.

So, as much as we crave space, we rush to fill it as soon as we find it.

What about an empty space is so uncomfortable?

One thing I’ve noticed, in myself and my clients, is that our efforts to fill our physical spaces often reflect a desire to fill a hole that we feel inside ourselves.

The external reflects the internal.

We fill our physical space the same way we often fill our schedules: with a lot of meaningless clutter and activities that don’t serve us. A cluttered space is the physical equivalent of being “busy:” it shows our presumed status but really just masks the emptiness we feel inside.

For so many years I lived surrounded by the clutter of my possessions. I wasn’t a hoarder, but I liked my stuff. Clothes. Books. Memorabilia. Odds and ends. Stacks of things. Awards and trophies. They gave me comfort.

Even when I surrounded myself with that stuff, I often filled my space with sounds of television and music. The sounds were a form of company. The helped me feel less alone. Less lonely. Less empty.

Today, I feel different.

The space looks empty. But it doesn’t feel empty. I don’t feel empty.

The external reflects the internal.

We see things as we are.

As I sit here now in my empty living room, starting at blank walls and listening to the silence, it feels like a graduation ceremony. A final test of sorts:

Sit in an empty space and notice how you feel.

How I feel is free.

I feel free from the confines of furniture I didn’t love. I feel free to move around: to dance, to lay on the floor, to strut around, like my entire living room expanse is a runway or a dance floor or a yoga studio.

I feel free to be fully expressed as myself, in however I choose to manifest that expression.

This space, and I, are filled with possibility and potential.

That’s the beauty of an empty space.

I realize how long it took for me to get here: to be able to sit, by myself, in an apartment empty of furniture, surrounded by blank walls, without the sounds from the television or music.

Just me, with myself. For a long time, I didn’t feel like I was enough to fill the space. I didn’t feel worthy of so much space. I had to learn this. I had to teach myself, to make it ok. To be able to sit here, in this space, and feel ok with spreading out.

So today I am here. Noticing. I am not fidgeting. I am not escaping. I am just here with myself.

This space does not feel empty. It is filled with me, and my presence.

And I am enough.


Renée Fishman has spent over 20 years helping individuals and businesses boost their productivity, navigate change and live their authentic lives, as an attorney, real estate broker and performance coach. She helps creative and mission-driven solopreneurs uplevel their service without sacrificing themselves. She is the founder of The Ritual Revolution™, a movement focused on living a life of intention, instead of reaction. She blogs about the journey of life at mymeadowreport.com.


Originally published at mymeadowreport.com on July 27, 2017.

Renée Fishman

Written by

I help busy entrepreneurs create space for their best work and achieve sustainable productivity. The Ritual Revolution™️. http://theritualrevolution.com

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