Making Space for Wonder and Discovery

I was walking Las Llajas Canyon Trail with a friend, looking up at the mountains against a clear blue sky. True to the name Las Llajas, the rock appeared in long, flat layers, one resting upon another, lines written into the mountainside.

I found myself wondering about the people who had stood on this land thousands of years before me. I imagined the Chumash walking through this landscape, looking up at these same mountains.

So much has changed since then, but some things remain.

Mist still rises against the mountains. The sun still finds its way through the trees and casts mysterious patterns of light on the ground. People still walk through natural beauty wondering about their lives, held for a little while by something larger, older, and quieter than themselves.

That morning, though, what captured me most was the scent.

I had walked this trail at least three times before, but suddenly I was acutely aware of pungent, spicy aromas in the air. I kept breathing them in. Where was that coming from? The plants? The earth? The sun warming the rocks?

And then I wondered: Had it always smelled this way?

Of course it had.

The aromas had been here on my previous walks. I simply hadn't noticed them.

Something had changed, but it wasn't the trail. It was me.

The first few times I walked there, some part of my attention had been occupied with practical things. Where does the trail turn? How steep is the next section? Am I going the right way? Where do I need to place my feet?

Now I knew the curves. I had a sense of what was ahead. My body had learned something my conscious mind no longer needed to manage so carefully.

I had metabolized the surface experience.

And because I no longer needed all of my attention for navigation, another layer of the experience became available to me.

Scent.

Subtlety.

The sublime, invisible world of the trail.

I have noticed this same dynamic in my life. As I become more masterful at something, I begin to see things I couldn't see when I was concentrating on simply doing it correctly. I notice an interesting anomaly. A subtle shift in someone's response. A possibility hidden inside an ordinary conversation. Patterns emerge because my attention is no longer consumed by the mechanics.

Maybe this is one of the hidden gifts of mastery: it gives our attention back to us.

And maybe this is a reason to be careful about saying yes too much.

When our plates are perpetually full, we may consume a great deal of life without actually tasting very much of it.

We answer the email while listening to the meeting, eat while watching television, walk while checking our phones. We accept one invitation and then another. We keep adding experiences, commitments, information, possessions and plans, believing somehow that more life will make us feel more alive.

But our senses require space.

A meal can contain a dozen exquisite flavors, but if we swallow too quickly, all we know is that we have eaten.

Life can become that way too: full, busy, accomplished, and strangely dull.

Then we wonder why we crave vacations, retreats, decluttering, silence. Perhaps we are trying to recover the space required to perceive our own lives again.

When I think about the tension that can arise when I anticipate saying "no" to something, it melts away when I think about the delicious "yes" to aliveness on the other side of that conversation.

Declining an invitation is not necessarily a rejection of a friend, it may be saying yes to inner peace. Turning off the television is not deprivation or missing out, but time for a nurturing bath or walk. Leaving an afternoon unscheduled is not wasted time, but an escape into imagination or meditation to enter into a magical world of wonder and possibility.

Doing one thing instead of five is not a failure of productivity. Sometimes an empty space is an invitation to another depth of experience.

Maybe the great invitation isn't to fill every available space with something good.

Maybe it is to leave enough room for the unexpected.

That morning on Las Llajas Canyon Trail, the mountain had not changed for me. The aromas had not suddenly appeared. Another dimension of the landscape had been waiting there all along.

I finally had enough space to notice it.

There is a kind of abundance that comes from adding things to our lives.

And there is another kind that appears only when we make room.

I want more of that kind.

I want to say yes to the limitless possibility inside an unfilled space. To leave enough room in my days for my senses to wake up, for curiosity to wander beyond the obvious, for pleasure to become particular again.

I have learned that aliveness isn't measured by how much life we can fit into our days. It's measured by how deeply we can enter the life that is already here.