The World Gets Bigger

My grandfather kept his shelves filled with books from around the world. When I was young, he encouraged me to read them and, more importantly, to think for myself. He taught me that listening to someone else's point of view or seeing a different way of living didn't mean I had to accept it as my own. I could learn about something without being threatened by it.

He played a huge role in shaping the way I learned to look at the world. I still talk about him and the gift of thinking for myself. I've tried to pass that same freedom and courage on to my children.

I think that is part of why I've always been drawn to people who look at the world in unusual and thoughtful ways. Frank Lloyd Wright is my favorite architect, and I visit his buildings whenever I get the chance. His work makes me pay attention to the experience of being in a space, not just what it looks like. One of the things that fascinates me is the way he uses compression and release. You can move through a narrow hallway or a low entrance and suddenly find yourself in a room that opens around you.

I loved that feeling in architecture long before life gave me another reason to understand it.

A major disruption can compress a life remarkably quickly. After a profound loss, my world became very small. Shock ran the show for several weeks. Sleep. Try to eat. Make it through the waking hours. Deal with whatever absolutely could not wait. Planning ahead disappeared. Curiosity disappeared. Even caring about relatively unimportant things required mental bandwidth I didn't have.

There wasn't anything wrong with that smaller world. It was what I could manage.

I decided fairly early that I wasn't going to wallow. Deciding that and having the capacity to do much about it were different things. The first openings were fairly ordinary. People I loved kept showing up. I took time to care for myself. A spa day gave me a few hours when nothing needed to be solved. A Halloween trip gave me enough distance to disconnect, catch my breath, and see past what had happened again. None of it fixed anything. It wasn't supposed to.

Eventually, there was simply more room to think about something beyond what absolutely had to be done, to care about things that didn't matter very much, and to be interested in something again. The world hadn't changed size. My capacity to experience it had.

Something else changed too. The world unexpectedly seemed brighter. Colors felt more vibrant, and things caught my attention in a way they hadn't for a while. As that space opened up, simply existing and engaging in my own life began to feel more valuable too. I hadn't expected to be so enthusiastic about it, or to find myself wanting a life that was simpler and somehow richer at the same time.

That surprised me. Bigger, as it turned out, didn't necessarily mean more. My world gets bigger when I slow down and observe. I can travel somewhere new, certainly, but I can also stand still long enough to notice the place I'm already in. Letting a space flow naturally while I soak in the experience is grounding in a way that filling every minute never has been.

Maybe that is another thing my grandfather and Wright have in common for me. Both changed the way I pay attention. One did it with books and conversations. The other does it with buildings I still deliberately seek out. Both left their imprint on the way I experience the world.

When I walk through one of Wright's compressed spaces now, I know it will eventually open. I don't need to rush through the smaller part to get there. It is part of the experience too.

Sometimes life gets very small because small is all we can manage. Eventually there can be room for more again. Not necessarily more activity or more noise. Just more of the world.