The Spaces In Between (Part 1) by Sarah Sansbury

Last week I took some time out in Enneagram-land, courtesy of an excellent online course run by the Scargill Community. As you may know, the Enneagram is a personality assessment tool, with the aim of gaining deeper self-knowledge and spiritual life insights. As you respond to a series of statements about yourself, your answers guide you down a path towards one of nine (“ennea” in Greek) categories, identified by a number and a descriptive name.

I am still a beginner in this process, but I did learn some interesting things during the course. Not all of them comfortable, but mostly enlightening. Here are just two observations:

Firstly, much as I expected and wanted to, I couldn’t quite squeeze myself into the criteria for Number 4, “The Artist/Romantic”. With my poetic aspirations, I was hoping to indulge a long-held secret urge to swan around in extravagant scarves and frilly sleeves, pausing only to languish dramatically on a threadbare chaise longue. Alas. (I may be exaggerating marginally here.) Instead, I found myself firmly self-categorized as a Number 5, “The Observer/Investigator”, the type of person who always has a pen, reads dictionaries like thrillers, and squirrels herself safely in the attic behind her book stashes to research, write, and rejoice in language minutiae, well away from parties, people, and other scary entities. (This may also be a slight caricature).

The second thing I learned was that these enneagram classifications were not referred to as “types”, but “spaces”, which somehow felt less constraining. Spaces to be ourselves within the gentle boundaries of our capabilities and weaknesses, following threads of potential and growth by God’s grace. The whole thing set me thinking about the significance of spaces.

Truthfully, the biggest space in my own life in recent times has in fact been my writing. Despite the joys of participating in the recent ACW event in London and hosting our lovely ACW poetry group each month, I have Not Written Anything. Wide plains of white pages and pots of pens await me patiently on my desk. I love writing. It has not been happening. I can’t explain why. Compulsive social media scrolling may have something to do with it. Distractions abound.

Notwithstanding … A friend explained to me recently the concept of a different kind of space: the “therapeutic pause”. This is not related to the owning of a fluffy pet for medicinal reasons (although maybe it should be), but rather the concept of coming back to a difficult piece of writing, music, or other work, after time away doing something else entirely, to discover that, through some neurological wizardry, everything has fallen into place. Your brain has been processing the necessary elements while taking a salutary break.

Perhaps there’s hope for me yet. 

(Photos courtesy of Pixabay)