Life Happens between and around Things

If you look at a standard printed page, or a web page like this one, you most likely see black, inked symbols both containing and surrounded by white space. The white space or white pixels form the space. Inside that space, the ink or coloured pixels form substance.

Normally, we fixate on the inked parts of a page. We pay many writers by the word, but never by the (inter-word) space, though that would work just as well. Words often get emphasised in text by adding more ink to them: by capitalisation, or by putting them in bold font. We all know the word for word and most of us can name different categories of word.

In contrast, our attention seems to slip past the white space on the page. We struggle with truly blank pages, but oxymoronically mark them: This page intentionally left blank. Carving plates for relief printing seems mind-bogglingly difficult and counter-intuitive when first encountered, because the artist needs to actively create the white space of the image by carving it, while ignoring the parts to be inked. And while we might intimately know the letters in our alphabet, how many can name the space that comes between letters?

But ... and here is the big but ... the beauty of a page is largely determined by the structure of the white space surrounding the letters, words, lines and paragraphs.

	This poster by Shahir Zag deliberately shows bad spacing (kerning, inter-word and inter-line spacing), and suggests the bad effects it can have.

	In contrast, this LaTeX document style for books is beautiful. Big wide margins carry side notes, captions and parenthetical remarks, as well as making the page beautiful to look at. This page comes from a paper on the Cantor Set.

This contrast goes beyond the purely aesthetic. The first image above suggests, poor spacing can result in feelings of unease, stress and headaches. In this study, researchers found that using a small screen to give feedback lead customers to give more critical reviews than when faced with a more expansive interface. Of course, it is not the case that more white space is always better: it would be very frustrating trying to read a novel of 100 000 words, with each word printed on a separate page. Getting the right balance between ink and white space is the important thing.

Life in White Space is the name of this blog. It takes ink and white space on a page as a metaphor applicable in many aspects of life. Its core message is that stress can be reduced and well-being improved by paying more attention to the white space that makes up our lives.

Let's have a look at how the ideas of inked and white spaces correspond to various aspects of life.

	On the Page	In the World
	document	class of things, events, concepts
	inked space	things, events, people, stuff, substance, concepts, identities, states, emotions, goals and milestones, intentions, the man-made world
	white space	space between and around things, time between and around events, conceptual space, emotional distance and detachment, assumed privileges, infrastructure, default states of mind, the natural world
	too little white space	clutter, crowding, time pressure, confusion, conceptual rigidity
	too much white space	starkness, shallowness, barrenness, disconnection, loneliness
	inked and white spaces in proportion	beauty, grace, rhythm, coordination, balance
	reading between the lines	subtlety, intuition, elegance, insight

So there are a lot of kinds of white space in our lives. One thing they share is that we don't pay them as much attention as we should. White space is often important, and we need to learn how to appreciate it. For example ...

The white space of friendship. One of the things I struggle with in conversations and in writing is .. well .. stopping. I have friends who don't want to talk to me so often because when we start to chat, it might last for 4 hours or even more. It is not my fault I am easy to talk to 😀. However, it is sometimes better to have a shorter conversation, hit the high points, even hang on to some good things for next time, and leave your friends eager to speak to you again.

Another way of putting it is: friendships are not just in the time you spend together, but the time you spend apart as well. The relationship would be endangered if the friends were living and working and playing and sleeping together. The time apart is as crucial as the time together. It is like the connection is a story, and the story is made up of paragraphs describing the together times. Between those paragraphs is the time apart, the white space of the relationship story.

Despite the importance of this relationship white space, if we are asked to characterise a friendship, the time apart rarely gets a mention. We seem to only pay attention to the paragraphs of ink, and skip over the spaces between them as values or unimportant. In other words, we focus on the things we do together, places we go together, the food we eat together. We don't mention the time apart, except perhaps to be surprise that the relationshipo survives despite the dead time, the white space.

We are not completely oblivious to this white space, this time apart. A particularly close friendship is often described as one where you have been apart for years, but when you meet, it was like you only met yesterday. Somehow the connection has survived despite the gaps. The implicit assumption is that the connection between friends is at best unaffected by time apart, and (more expectedly) diminished by it.

But what if the time apart is a vital part of nourishing, defining and shaping the relationship? Perhaps it needs acknowledging just as much as the time together. Time apart can have many different flavours, depending on whether you parted with angry words or with cheek kisses and hugs, depending on whether it feels like a nonlocal continuation of the connection or like ghosting, depending on whether you miss out on being there for important events in each others' lives, or you are present in spirit even when not in body. Long-distance friendships after a year are different to local ones are after one month, even if the total amount of together-time is the same. The white space (time) is different, so the outcome is different.

What I hope you get from this discussion of friendship is that the white space of abstract entities does not receive the attention nor the lip-service of its 'inked' counterpart. But that does not mean it is not important or even vital. By ignoring the white space, we miss out on opportunities for both understanding our world and working better with it. This blog is about developing that understanding of all kinds of white space, and learning how to use it to live better.