Congrats! You made it to Day 6 of your New Year's Resolution efforts.
You’re going strong. You’re eating healthy. You’re working out. You’re going to do that thing you’ve always wanted to do. You’re going to become that version of yourself that embraces change and soars on the winds of victory. You’re committing to your resolutions with fervor. You’re living with gusto, with chutzpah! In these last few days, you’ve found yourself staring into the mirror, repeating affirmations you read in an Instagram caption.
This year I will accept myself unconditionally. This year I will accept myself unconditionally. This year I will accept myself unconditionally.
And then—work becomes busy again. You catch a cold. Your commute becomes 26 minutes longer because of construction on the highway. The minutes of the day get squeezed tight. What was easy to accomplish two weeks ago is now seemingly impossible. You lose sight of what it was you really wanted. The Jenga blocks of life stack up, higher and higher, until the tower—the very essence of your endeavors—wobbles and sways, a faulty establishment on uneven footing.
You start to believe that you are incompetent—that you are not meant to lose those 15 pounds, stop smoking those cigarettes, or save up those dollar bills. You readily conceive an idea in your mind that you are what you’ve always been: a nonachiever.
The funny thing is—it all happens so subtly. It’s not like you decide, one day upon waking up, that you’re going to stop pursuing your New Year’s Resolution. Instead, it simply fades away like a distant memory—something that at one point felt very real but has since evaporated, like a lifting fog.
What if it didn’t have to come to that?
What if there were a way to avoid these inevitable failures?
About a month ago, I was talking on the phone with a close friend of mine. He had just seen the movie The Wild Robot, which I had recommended to him. It led to a conversation about animation in general, which then led into a discussion about Studio Ghibli films (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, etc.). We were trying to pinpoint what makes them so special.
“There’s a certain technique Hayao Miyazaki uses in those films,” my friend said. “I forget the word for it; it’s a Japanese word. But it has to do with all the intentional pauses and quiet scenes that are scattered throughout the movie. There will be all these moments—maybe 5 seconds, maybe a full minute—when nothing is happening. It’s what makes those movies so magical. It makes the viewer stop and just exist in the present moment of the movie.”
The word my friend was referring to is ma (間), which literally means a gap, space, or pause. Wikipedia describes it as the following:
In modern interpretations of traditional Japanese arts and culture, ma is an artistic interpretation of an empty space, often holding as much importance as the rest of an artwork and focusing the viewer on the intention of negative space in an art piece.
The existence of ma in an artwork has been interpreted as "an emptiness full of possibilities, like a promise yet to be fulfilled,” and has been described as "the silence between the notes which make the music.”
A couple of weeks after this conversation about ma, I watched the 2023 movie Perfect Days. It follows the life of Hirayama, a contented toilet cleaner in Tokyo who—despite his very repetitive and structured daily routine—finds joy in the little things: his cassette tapes, going to the bookstore, photographing trees with his camera.
It’s a beautiful movie, one that really stuck with me, but it’s also one of those films where not much actually happens. There’s no great buildup or dramatic plotline. Instead, there are countless scenes where seemingly nothing is happening—where Hirayama is staring at trees or cleaning a toilet. As I watched, it reminded me of the concept of ma. I thought to myself, “Ah—I understand now. This is why leaving space is so important.”
So—I will ask you a question:
While you are still in the midst of attempting to achieve your New Year’s Resolution, how can you create ma in your life?
There is this ubiquitous notion, which largely stems from growing up in American culture, that in order to live a meaningful life, you must accomplish a great deal. You must amass a fortune or own a significant amount of real estate. You must become a head executive or leave behind a body of work that cements you in the annals of history. But the reality is that most people don’t accomplish all of this. Instead, they do what’s manageable—which, in most cases, means starting a family and surviving long enough to retire.
But even if you don’t accomplish a great deal, that doesn’t mean you are a nonachiever. That doesn’t mean you can’t still accomplish your New Year’s Resolution.
It might feel easy to revert to what you’ve done before—filling the margins of your day to the brim with more and more and more.
Or.
You can choose to leave room for space. You can do less. Far less, actually. When you start to feel your motivation faltering, and that little dubious voice creeps into your head, telling you that you were never going to achieve your goal anyway, you can lock your phone away, sit in a chair, and do nothing.
And somewhere in that time sitting in the chair, when you have separated yourself from the person you were just ten minutes prior, you will create space—a void that grants you the permission to realize you have not lost your way. That you can still go to the gym tomorrow or the next day. That you can have a salad for lunch. That ten dollars added to your savings account is better than nothing. That not all hope is lost—far from it.
Ma can take many forms. It will mean something different for you than it does for me. The very point of it is that it is shapeless and empty. But please, just remember: it is somewhere in this space that we avoid losing ourselves.
Those spaces, too, have meaning.
Congrats! You made it to Day 6 of your New Year's Resolution efforts.
You’re going strong. You’re eating healthy. You’re working out. You’re going to do that thing you’ve always wanted to do. You’re going to become that version of yourself that embraces change and soars on the winds of victory. You’re committing to your resolutions with fervor. You’re living with gusto, with chutzpah! In these last few days, you’ve found yourself staring into the mirror, repeating affirmations you read in an Instagram caption.
This year I will accept myself unconditionally. This year I will accept myself unconditionally. This year I will accept myself unconditionally.
And then—work becomes busy again. You catch a cold. Your commute becomes 26 minutes longer because of construction on the highway. The minutes of the day get squeezed tight. What was easy to accomplish two weeks ago is now seemingly impossible. You lose sight of what it was you really wanted. The Jenga blocks of life stack up, higher and higher, until the tower—the very essence of your endeavors—wobbles and sways, a faulty establishment on uneven footing.
You start to believe that you are incompetent—that you are not meant to lose those 15 pounds, stop smoking those cigarettes, or save up those dollar bills. You readily conceive an idea in your mind that you are what you’ve always been: a nonachiever.
The funny thing is—it all happens so subtly. It’s not like you decide, one day upon waking up, that you’re going to stop pursuing your New Year’s Resolution. Instead, it simply fades away like a distant memory—something that at one point felt very real but has since evaporated, like a lifting fog.
What if it didn’t have to come to that?
What if there were a way to avoid these inevitable failures?
About a month ago, I was talking on the phone with a close friend of mine. He had just seen the movie The Wild Robot, which I had recommended to him. It led to a conversation about animation in general, which then led into a discussion about Studio Ghibli films (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, etc.). We were trying to pinpoint what makes them so special.
“There’s a certain technique Hayao Miyazaki uses in those films,” my friend said. “I forget the word for it; it’s a Japanese word. But it has to do with all the intentional pauses and quiet scenes that are scattered throughout the movie. There will be all these moments—maybe 5 seconds, maybe a full minute—when nothing is happening. It’s what makes those movies so magical. It makes the viewer stop and just exist in the present moment of the movie.”
The word my friend was referring to is ma (間), which literally means a gap, space, or pause. Wikipedia describes it as the following:
In modern interpretations of traditional Japanese arts and culture, ma is an artistic interpretation of an empty space, often holding as much importance as the rest of an artwork and focusing the viewer on the intention of negative space in an art piece.
The existence of ma in an artwork has been interpreted as "an emptiness full of possibilities, like a promise yet to be fulfilled,” and has been described as "the silence between the notes which make the music.”
A couple of weeks after this conversation about ma, I watched the 2023 movie Perfect Days. It follows the life of Hirayama, a contented toilet cleaner in Tokyo who—despite his very repetitive and structured daily routine—finds joy in the little things: his cassette tapes, going to the bookstore, photographing trees with his camera.
It’s a beautiful movie, one that really stuck with me, but it’s also one of those films where not much actually happens. There’s no great buildup or dramatic plotline. Instead, there are countless scenes where seemingly nothing is happening—where Hirayama is staring at trees or cleaning a toilet. As I watched, it reminded me of the concept of ma. I thought to myself, “Ah—I understand now. This is why leaving space is so important.”
So—I will ask you a question:
While you are still in the midst of attempting to achieve your New Year’s Resolution, how can you create ma in your life?
There is this ubiquitous notion, which largely stems from growing up in American culture, that in order to live a meaningful life, you must accomplish a great deal. You must amass a fortune or own a significant amount of real estate. You must become a head executive or leave behind a body of work that cements you in the annals of history. But the reality is that most people don’t accomplish all of this. Instead, they do what’s manageable—which, in most cases, means starting a family and surviving long enough to retire.
But even if you don’t accomplish a great deal, that doesn’t mean you are a nonachiever. That doesn’t mean you can’t still accomplish your New Year’s Resolution.
It might feel easy to revert to what you’ve done before—filling the margins of your day to the brim with more and more and more.
Or.
You can choose to leave room for space. You can do less. Far less, actually. When you start to feel your motivation faltering, and that little dubious voice creeps into your head, telling you that you were never going to achieve your goal anyway, you can lock your phone away, sit in a chair, and do nothing.
And somewhere in that time sitting in the chair, when you have separated yourself from the person you were just ten minutes prior, you will create space—a void that grants you the permission to realize you have not lost your way. That you can still go to the gym tomorrow or the next day. That you can have a salad for lunch. That ten dollars added to your savings account is better than nothing. That not all hope is lost—far from it.
Ma can take many forms. It will mean something different for you than it does for me. The very point of it is that it is shapeless and empty. But please, just remember: it is somewhere in this space that we avoid losing ourselves.
Those spaces, too, have meaning.
