Room

Room.

I’ve been thinking about that word. Room.

You’ve got a living room, bedroom, bathroom. The kitchen is obviously a room, although nobody walks into the kitchen and says, “Well, here I am in the kitchen room.” It already has a job, so apparently it loses the generic designation.

But then there’s just room.

Is there enough room?

Move over. Make some room.

Give me room.

And now we’re not talking about architecture anymore.

Because somewhere inside the language, room seems to mean something more basic than four walls. It means enough available space for something to happen.

You know what I mean?

Like, imagine we’re sitting here across the table and I move these things over a little bit. There. Now there’s room.

I didn’t create anything.

Nothing was manufactured.

I just rearranged what was already here, and suddenly this peculiar invisible substance called room appeared between us.

That’s interesting.

You can build four walls around it later. Put up a ceiling. Cut a window into one side. Drag in a couch, a television, a ceiling fan, maybe a little table. Now everybody agrees, that’s a room.

But the room was there before the furniture.

In fact, the furniture depends on it.

The walls almost seem to be describing the emptiness.

They go up around some available space and say, this particular emptiness belongs here.

Bedroom.

Living room.

Bathroom.

Whatever.

But first there has to be enough nothing.

And I like rooms.

I always have.

When I was little, I shared a room, and then eventually I got my own room. Man, that was great. 

I remember the first poster I put on the wall was an alligator poster.

I have absolutely no idea where I got it.

It just materialized somehow, like artifacts tended to do when you were a kid. One day you didn’t own an alligator poster, and then suddenly there was this alligator living on your wall.

I thought maybe I can have more things in my room. 

Thoughts, maybe.

Feelings.

Plans.

People.

A day.

You need room around things or everything starts piling into everything else until your whole existence becomes too crowded with thoughts.

(no room )

And this is where the word starts doing something strange again.

Because you can make room in your life.

But everybody understands the sentence.

Make room for yourself.

Make room for somebody else.

Make room for whatever happens next.

It almost seems like loving yourself has something to do with that.

Give yourself enough room.

And then things begin finding their places.

The day starts arranging itself.

Not perfectly. Nothing mystical like that.

But there’s enough space between things that you can see more clearly.

Maybe order doesn’t always have to be imposed.

Maybe sometimes order emerges because you stopped crowding everything.

You make room, and somehow life starts using it.

Room.

A physical place.

An empty area.

Permission.

Possibility.

Distance.

A little nothing that allows something to happen.

You gotta have room.

Not necessarily a room.

That’s different.

You can lose your room and still have room.

You can own ten rooms and somehow have none.

But you gotta have room.