musings on 間: the spaces in-between

what makes ghibli films feel the way they do? there’s something ineffable about them. a quiet, a peace. a kind of stillness that pulls you in. if you've watched anything ghibli, you can probably put your finger on what i'm intimating here.

this feeling is often explained through the japanese concept of 'ma' (間). there isn’t a perfect english translation for it. it's a gap in time or space; negative space; a pause between things; a quiet that makes the sound meaningful.

yet these don't quite capture the nuance of ma, for they make it sound like an emptiness, a lack of something. ma isn’t just an absence of stuff. it’s an in-betweenness thick with presence. it’s the tension and interplay between objects, not just the objects themselves. this attention to intervals shows up often in japanese art.

ma is the scene of chihiro on the train, gliding over endless water. it’s in the way totoro waits in the rain, not doing much at all except standing, feeling, being. you find it in the long, quiet shots that punctuate stretches of exposition or plot in many ghibli films.

and somehow, this is what makes those beloved worlds feel enchanted. in moments of ma, we can take a breath along with the characters. the world just exists, and we exist with it. hayao miyazaki himself has said that these moments of ma in his films are very intentional.

i think we're sorely 間-deprived in the modern world.

there’s always something to do. work, errands, endless responsibilities. even rest has become something to optimize, through self-care checklists or productivity hacks disguised as relaxation. stillness feels like a luxury, a skill to practice, or worse, a waste of time.

when was the last time you just... did nothing? and i don't mean procrastinating or doomscrolling or half-watching a show. just nothing.

and when was the last time you did nothing with someone? i find that these days, hanging out seems to always require an agenda (even if implicit): a dinner, a catch-up, a coffee chat.

when we were kids, we didn’t need a reason. we just sat around together. sprawled on the floor, lost in our own worlds, sometimes talking, sometimes engaging in parallel play. it was enough just to be in the same space.

maybe that’s why we’re drawn to the verdant, unhurried worlds of ghibli. or those wildly popular lofi music streams of a character curled up in a warm-lit room, lazing around (which are, perhaps unsurprisingly, directly inspired by ghibli). these are temporary solaces standing in stark juxtaposition to our lives dominated by doing.

i’m also interested in 間 on a smaller scale – the kind that exists in the microscopic moments of our everyday interactions.

there’s a famous quote, often misattributed to Viktor Frankl (but exact origins unknown):

between stimulus and response there is a space.
in that space is our power to choose our response.
in our response lies our growth and our freedom.

this, too, is ma. and cultivating this kind of space – a capacity to pause – is becoming more of a superpower as the world seems to become more like a turbulent fever dream amid interconnected crises.

in relationships, ma can look like noticing when strong emotions are rising and resisting the urge to react immediately. feeling without instantly acting. sitting with intensity, or discomfort, without letting it take the wheel. so much damage and regret comes from the absence of that space.

i really think that more than 90% of the time, the greatest gift we can bring to our relationships & interactions is a gentle curiosity underpinned by ma: a stable container in which we are calm and open to listening to whatever is up for them. just simply being there in this state with someone is enough; words are secondary:

in online spaces, i think cultivating ma could be a super high-leverage thing to help us make better sense of the world & each other. algorithms are built to collapse that space between stimulus and response, to keep us in a reactive state, to make us feel first and think later (if at all). rage and division spread faster than thoughtful & earnest reflection.

but meaning-making requires nervous systems that aren’t in fight-or-flight. without the spaciousness of ma, there’s no room to process, to understand, to choose how we respond instead of being yanked into extreme ideological polarities and leaping into conflict.

what does cultivating ma online look like in practice? i'm not entirely sure. but i suspect it begins in our individual small actions around how we choose to engage with online spaces.

this turns my attention to 間 from the perspective of community.

we are complex. multi-hyphenate. fluid. and yet, we often have to flatten our multitudes to fit different environments, reducing our depth to be legible and palatable. so many communal contexts expect us to arrive already knowing who we are, where we fit, what we’re supposed to do:

the office expects your professional self.
family gatherings want your agreeable self.
academic settings value your rational, objective self.
team meetings call for your solutions-only, problem-solving self.
spiritual spaces often expect your calm, reflective self.
dating apps want your charming, best-foot-forward self.
social spaces often reward surface-level versions of who you are.
etc etc

one of my longings this year is to be part of spaces where i don’t have to perform a version of myself. where i can just be, without the quiet pressure to show up in a particular way. and i want to host spaces like that too. places with room for uncertainty, where contradictions and paradoxes can be held. environments that embrace not-knowing.

i also wonder—how can we design for ma in a more abstract sense? the ma between ideas, between ideologies?

a big chunk of the work we need to do to depolarize interactions, especially around political discourse, is to create more breathing room around the opinions we cling to.

if we could create space around these opinions, to critically question and examine them, we'd open the doorway to better seeing & empathizing with what others have to say. we can begin to listen with the intent to actually understand, rather than just respond through the filter of our beliefs.

so maybe ma isn’t just something we need personally, but something we need collectively too.

i invite you to allow yourself a moment of 間 today. enjoy that spaciousness!