Creating space
On designing for slowness, curious play, and inner belonging
To want and to create can often feel distant from each other. The essential act is to be (as fully as possible) inside what you’re creating. This includes finding ways to be soft with yourself, meander and play, grow deeper into trust, be endlessly curious, and let yourself slowly unravel into more of you.
This premise holds true for what we want and create in community, too. With our families and neighborhoods, through various modes of work and gathering, with children, adults, and other nature beings.
Let me focus on this idea in the context of creating spaces of learning for children. I trust that through this example you’ll find connections to your own life and work—in all that you want and are creating.
I work with a lot of people who want beautiful things for children. I hear them name what they want—more slowness and silence, more play, more wonderment and curiosity, more joy, more nature, more time for all of this (instead of what seems to take up the time).
I see them try and try again to make time for the things they know are important for children and those who care for children, the things that nurture learning as curious, liberated, whole.
I once, too, was a person who tried and tried from inside systems of learning. I know such systems well and how hard it is to see the whole of them when your work is embedded into the mechanistic pathways of their form. My current location and aperture (now almost six years working outside of such systems) afford me a different view and invite new kinds of questions:
How might we create spaces for slowness, silence, play, wonder, and inner belonging without adding anything, fixing anything, or relying on efforts of naming (e.g., “play time”)?
How might we shift our attention from time to essence as a way to curate space?
How might allow and notice become primary modes for creating?
To find ways to communicate what this means, what it might look like in a place of learning, and how to put such ideas into practice is my current work. Here are four layers (of practice and perspective) that I hope will be clear and actionable for those wanting to create new kinds of learning spaces as part of our collective creating of a more beautiful world.
Less.
Everything less. Anything you think you want to add, consider NOT adding it. Find something to take away instead. Although it may seem intuitive or helpful to add in playtime or schedule 5 minutes of silence, working inside structures of time as your primary way to create space will always end up feeling like you don’t have enough. It may lead to glimpses of “improvement,” but you’ll stay inside the “wanting more” state of being. And it will continue to take incredible effort to “fit things in.”
The key is to shift from “push into” structures of time to “allow and trust” what will grow from the less. Play is of breath and being; if the space isn’t filled with something else, there will be play. Wonder is intrinsic to who we are. It doesn’t need to be “sparked” with activities. Clear the cluttered, over-scaffolded, over-optioned soil, and authentic wonder will thrive. Slowness and silence, too. None of this will ever grow sustainably through adding in. You allow them to emerge in the space that’s created from what you take away.
Also, let yourself disengage from the school stories of “I have to do” or “they make us” or “this is required.” There will always be limits and time in the 3D. These things don’t go away when you begin to practice with “Less,” you simply let their frames loosen your view. Focus on the things inside your scope of agency that you can take away, delete, stop. Once you shift your perspective and begin to create for less instead of more, you’ll find more space for what you’re creating.
Open.
Just like shelves in a small room create more physical space, clear structures of intention create more open-ended space for learning. Longer stretches of time with defined big-picture parameters such as writing workshop, material exploration, number study, outdoor inquiry, or creative discovery allow everyone to focus on ___, but allow the what-how-why of the experience to be open. The openness allows for authentic differentiation (based on each child’s unique approach and dispositions for learning) and allows opportunities for boredom. Boredom is essential for children (and adults) to find their intrinsic motivations for curiosity and locate their own source of agency to find and follow questions that matter to them.
Openness also allows for not-knowing, wonder without immediate answers, shifts of perspective, layers of revision and remembering, extended process, authentic cycles of know-don’t know-learn anew-be wrong-shift-try something else-find again, and genuine moments of connection with others learning inside their own openness. When designing for openness, we ask: Where can the structure be expanded (perhaps also loosened), while also given a clear frame of intention/possibility for the learning to live into? There’s a dialogue that grows between open and limit. When we limit the frame (and the materials for use inside the frame), the openness expands. It’s the openness that nurtures wholeness of expression and essence of liberated curiosity.
Between.
The between is where we meander, dawdle, get lost, daydream, rest, feel, integrate, stretch, savor, loop, connect, remember. The between is where we can be ourselves—simply, whole, free from what came before and what will come after. This is the space where we nurture our inner belonging, the belonging to ourselves, who we are, and why we’re here.
It is essential to design for this. And although its design may begin through a focus on curating for less and open, it is its own unique space that deserves its own consideration. This may start with noticing slivers of time between one moment and another. From here, it can grow to endless (and simultaneous) layers of between found in every small moment and every small thing.
The best way to learn how to create more between space for others is to attune to this inside yourself. Where do you find space to wander and bewilder? Where and how do you linger with and integrate a new experience? What supports you to breathe and be whole as/with yourself? If you feel as if you don’t have enough of this space for yourself, allow yourself to be with this feeling and see what might emerge from letting yourself see this. The more you nurture your own between, the more opportunities you’ll find for others to nurture this for themselves.
Notice.
To notice, to let yourself notice, and to let noticing be enough are three distinct aspects of what it means to notice. In practice, noticing requires a shift of perspective from one of push (fix, add, prefer) to one of witness (allow, trust, expand the view). Often this is felt as an absence of action at first (because “doing” has been engrained in our bodies in particular ways), but through practice, noticing becomes an octopus of action through expanded ways of being.
In contexts of learning it is important for the “teacher” to notice the current approach to “teaching”—what is the teacher “doing” to support learning, what are the actions, the words spoken, etc. What is of push (add, fix, prefer) and what is of witness (allow, trust, expand the view)? It is then important to nurture space that allows noticing to become essential practice, the essential “action” in the work of “teaching.”
When learning spaces evolve to be supported through rich a varied layers of noticing (and trust that noticing is essential and enough), everything of learning inside the space liberates. Just as an open space allows children to grow their intrinsic motivations for their own curiosities and expressions, a noticing framework allows educators to see more of the what-how-why of all learning and all learners, including their own frames of understanding and dispositions of being.
We are closer than we think to creating what we want. And, as I’ve said many times before, it’s all much simpler than we think it is.
We do less. We open space. We allow between. And we notice it all—the mess of it, the play, the wonder, ourselves as whole and always belonging. Each layer offers a shift of perspective that enacts a practice to be what is being created (even if the mind tells you it’s far away or impossible).
It’s all possible. It’s all already here. Our work is to claim it, jump in, and share our liberation with others.
love+light, Melissa