The importance of empty spaces

Claire Wineland died after having complications with her lung transplant surgery in September 2018. She’s the happiest person I have came across in the interweb and her battle against Cystic Fibrosis have impacted the world in ways unimaginable - like it does now with may way of thinking - maybe its the deep gratitude that I feel about life..or yet the understanding that she had with her condition.

She framed her condition as a place to create awareness to others having the same ordeal instead of pondering on how unfortunate fate have dealt with her. As she understood well that she is going to die, she created a lot of videos and talks, even a book to share knowledge that she acquired. Accepting it like a stoic, that’s basically what she did - death never stopped her from moving us.

I was listening to one fo Tim Ferriss’s talk and he explained a new concept to me that has struck me in the past week. It was the value of making sure that the end of each day the you are going to reflect that “always try to be the weakest man in the room at something”. Emptying spaces became more self evident to any pursuit of learning or progress as this concept literally shattered my mind into pieces and made me wonder if I’m doing everything right especially for learning, resource allocation (money, assets or any other material stuff..) and maintaining a healthy body and brain.

I carefully reviewed my ideas, belief systems and past decisions for a week which factors in search of which aspects I’m bottoming out whenever I aspire giving time to lectures about science or learning spanish through the spanish version of Yuval’s Sapiens…which areas of my life I am giving up just to pursue this crazy learning mechanisms?

I came to understand that I have practiced some parts the concept of emptying spaces in some capacity. I got parts of it from Dr. Peterson’s lectures especially as to survive the sufferings of life, one must accept that there is no other way than becoming more responsible for yourself and your family, then if your well enough to do this…try help your immediate environment. It is kind of a focusing mechanism to reduce the amount of challenges you will tackle, kind of a frame of thinking to create spaces that will allow you to help and ignore the other stuff.

Ignoring and forgetting as a stoic could be superpowers that act as filters for experiencing reality. The things that we can’t control in the universe is so large and the effort to even tilt other people’s thinking so immense and counter productive. Learning physics has to give up something. Getting fit has to give up something. Getting a great job gives up a certain aspect of your personal control to decision making. Something has to give up. Creating empty spaces allows the new to come in and replace the old. Adding these features provides better clarity of vision and use of limited time.

That’s what Claire did with her limited time, she never focused on her inability to live a normal life. She embraced the thought of dying and allow herself to develop an empty space and become a gateway for communicating an experience that is so much needed in society today. Most walk like entitled gods that thinking the abundance of resources around us will keep going on forever - it’s not, and actually the measurements shows that all of our resources will fail in twenty five to fifty years due to our over use of natural resources.