wes kennedy

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Space

I need space to find my center. I need space to freshen up my creativity. I need space to quiet my mind. I need space to not be a jerk. I wasn’t always this way, but it’s become something that’s very real in my life. It’s become something that I can’t ignore and when I don’t have space in my life to just be, I find my mind becoming very negative.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out where this came from, as if there was something wrong with the fact that I needed alone time. The truth is, I think it’s solely because it’s just who I am and there’s nothing wrong with that.

When I get long periods of time to be alone, where I have space, I find that I come back refreshed and full of ideas. When I spend a long period of time without pockets of space, I find the ideas run dry and there’s just nothing left in that well to come back to.

Space Week

It’s well documented that Bill Gates takes a week twice a year to be alone in a cabin and think, aptly called “Think Week”. I find this idea to be very attractive and something that I want to give a go. So, I’ve identified a Monday through Friday that is between some big things going on at work, where my wife will be out of town, giving me the perfect opportunity to have what I’m going to call “Space Week”.

I’ve started to plan some things that I’ll need to enable myself to have the space necessary during Space Week. Primarily just some low-level To-Do items, but also starting to gather a book list, since a majority of the week will be spent reading, writing and thinking. I have some “problem” statements that I want to ruminate over and I’ve started to put together some rough guidelines for the week to help me not get lost in the depths of the internet.

The trick with this is, I want to give myself space to be myself, but I still want to limit myself from the negative habits that I quickly fall back into when I’m alone. The biggest issue I will run into is eating out, so I want to make sure I have a meal plan and all of the items necessary to satiate me during the week.

Non-Space Weeks

The bigger issue that I need to solve is how I find space during the rest of the year. There are pockets of time that randomly appear of a day or so, but there’s rarely a chance that I get that is multiple days that I can guarantee that I will have this time. That means that I need to get better at finding the time in smaller pockets and making them work for me. Find the smaller pockets of time (1-4 hours) isn’t really that difficult, but getting myself into a creative or quiet and focused mode is much harder.

I will be working on this throughout the year, so I’m sure you’ll hear more from me on this.