What Am I Without Space To Tell Me How I Move?
I am fortunate to live in a house where I can walk ten paces in the hall without having to avoid furniture or encounter a wall. The other day, a friend visited me and as we were talking, he looked around the room and said to me, ‘It’s such a waste of space that you don’t have people over more often.’ I was intrigued by his comment, and as a language enthusiast, once he left, I looked up what it means to ‘waste’ — use or expend carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose; fail to make full or good use of. And from this perspective I wondered about this notion of wasting space — or the implication that a good use of space would be to fill it with people, or objects that serve people, in order to get value from it.
Space —
1. a continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied
2. the dimensions of height, depth, and width within which all things exist and move
When I saw these definitions of space in the Oxford Dictionary, I was quite surprised by the first one. Initially, I associated it with the way humans have commodified space. It reminded me of every advertisement I’ve seen announcing ‘office space available for rent’ or how throughout history ‘unoccupied’ land has been quickly claimed by human colonisers as their own. I was much more convinced by the second definition — it was more literal and scientific, I thought. And the more I reflected on it, I realised that the important part was that it specified that space is where things move. Because what happens when my body encounters space is that it recognises a possibility to move. If you stood in a box that matched your height and width to the millimetre, you would quickly find out that a lack of space results in a limitation of movement. And it’s only when I thought about space from the perspective of my body that I realised that ‘free, available, or unoccupied’ could actually refer to possibilities for movement.
I don’t always describe where my thoughts that actually make it to the page originate, but this time it seems necessary to mention that I continued mulling over this relationship between space and movement on an evening walk. After watching the sunset I made my way home via a forest trail. As it got dark I noticed that I was no longer discerning the bodies in my surroundings like trees or rocks, but my eyes were looking for the space between things because that’s where my body could be secure about moving freely and without getting hurt.
Physics tells us how objects with large masses change the shape of space by creating curves in otherwise flat space-time. And these curves determine how other objects move in space. I think this is true on smaller-than-astral scales as well — that bodies, simply by their presence, change the shape of space, and the shape of space determines how other bodies can move.
And I wonder about what this space has to do with our movement… Imagine for a moment an unlikely situation that we only had narrow diagonal doorways in buildings — wouldn’t we have to contort ourselves, to lean, bend, or step in particular ways in order to move through these spaces we construct? Perhaps moving through them would seem normal to us, because an able body could learn to do what is needed to pass through. But the reality is that we are used to seeing things as ‘normal’ based on how we practice them. And we don’t really think about whether what is ‘normal’ according to societal practice meets the natural needs of our body.
Ironically, I think at some level, as a species, we do understand how space affects us. If you think about it, punishment across cultures involves confinement at varying degrees — from being told to stand in a corner for misbehaving at school, or being limited to your room when you’re grounded, and everything from tiny cells to extreme solitary confinement in prisons… On the other side, most people have a positive response to wide open spaces — even the travel and tourism market has capitalised on ‘weekend getaways’ that promise rejuvenation with expanses of scenery far away from crowded cities. But it’s the cities that I’m curious about — because it’s in cities that the daily life of a significant portion of the population plays out. Where we want to make the most use of space so we construct wall-to-wall boxes that we claim as our own to use for shelter, culture, business, entertainment… And in these boxes and the regular life we live in them, is it possible for us to think about or pay attention to how we ‘interact’ with space and everything we share space with?
