Permission, Patience, and Spaciousness

For the past few months, three words have kept coming back to me as mantras, or perhaps guideposts: permission, patience, and spaciousness.

They seem to belong together.

Spaciousness is about slowing down enough to create a little room around our lives. It doesn’t have to mean going away on retreat or clearing an entire day. It can happen in small moments—a pause before we answer, a few minutes between appointments, sitting quietly before moving on to the next thing.

An 89-year-old client and I were talking about this recently. He noticed that he is still hurrying through his days, filling them with meetings and destinations. We talked about creating enough space to pause and, as he put it, not get out over our skis.

I loved that.

Spaciousness also gives us a chance to come back into our bodies. So much of the time we live from the neck up—thinking, planning, anticipating, worrying, making lists, solving the next problem.

What happens when we pause long enough to sense into the rest of ourselves?

Where am I tight? Where am I sore? Where am I holding my breath? What happens if I bring my attention there—not necessarily to fix it, but simply to notice it and be with it?

There is intelligence throughout our whole system, not only in our thinking minds. Our bodies are continually giving us information. But we have to slow down enough to hear it.

Permission is part of what makes that spaciousness possible. Permission to rest. Permission to pause. Permission to breathe. Permission not to fill the calendar to the edges. Permission, perhaps, to simply sit for a few moments and feel ourselves here.

This can be especially important as we grow older. In many cultures, elderhood has included some form of stepping away from the demands of ordinary life and turning toward contemplation. In Hindu tradition, for instance, there is the ancient idea of gradually withdrawing from worldly responsibilities and turning toward a more inward and spiritual life.

Joan Erikson wrote about the possibility of gerotranscendence in the final stage of life. And, with characteristic playfulness, she sometimes spoke of transcend-dance.

I love that, too.

What if part of elderhood is allowing ourselves enough time and space to feel into that? To sense into it. To open to it.

And yet exhaustion is one of the most common threads I hear from my clients—not only people in their 70s and 80s, but people in their 50s who tell me how tired they are while describing calendars packed with obligations and endless to-do lists. We keep moving because we are trying to get everything done so that, finally, we can rest.

Except that the list fills up again.

Which brings me to patience.

Patience may require a kind of trust: trust that not everything has to be handled immediately. Trust that if we loosen our grip, slow down, and give something a little more space, some things will work themselves out—or at least become clearer.

Of course there are times of crisis when we need to hustle. Life sometimes requires us to move quickly and act decisively.

But much of the time, living in a state of constant urgency doesn’t serve us. Our bodies know this, sometimes before our minds do. We tighten. We have trouble sleeping. We remain keyed up. We reach the end of the day exhausted and wonder why we can’t settle.

Maybe these three words offer another way:

Permission to stop pushing.

Spaciousness to notice what is here—in our lives and in our bodies.

Patience to trust that we don’t have to know—or do—the next thing quite yet.

Perhaps what we are looking for isn’t waiting for us at the end of the to-do list.

Perhaps some of it is already here, waiting for us to slow down enough to notice.