I first heard about the Japanese concept of yutori when I was listening to the On Being podcast interview of poet Naomi Shihab Nye. She had been teaching in Japan, and one of her students told her about this Japanese concept of well-being. Yutori encompasses the ideas of margin (i.e., building a little extra time into your daily activities) along with simply observing life. After all, you can’t observe if you don’t have the time. Yutori, as Nye tells the story of her introduction to it, includes “a kind of living with spaciousness. For example, it’s leaving early enough to get somewhere so that you know you’re going to arrive early, so when you get there, you have time to look around.” She also applies the concept to reading a poem, saying that “you can be in that space of the poem, and it can hold you in its space, and you don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to paraphrase it. You just hold it, and it allows you to see differently.” I like the word spaciousness, but I think that far too often, I tend to contextualize it only terms of time or space. Maybe you’re like me, just wishing to move through the world with a little more calm, a little more margin. But what if we applied this concept of spaciousness to other people?
Making room for others’ differences, opinions, and eccentricities gives me pause. Can I observe the differences between us without feeling like I have to persuade you to my opinion or personal preference? Is it possible for me not to defend what I like or think or feel but simply make room in my observation for yours? When I think about questions like these, I feel a bit uncomfortable. I’ve failed – plenty. I have a knee-jerk response to share my favorite whatever-it-is or my opinion (however informed or uninformed) if someone else is sharing, whether or not they asked for it. I’d like to develop my mind-muscles to be able to “hold” your differing way of doing life without feeling like I have to dump my preferred way on you, unasked for.
Like Nye’s comparison to reading a poem, I want to hold others’ differences without needing to explain or fully understand them. I want to recognize that these differences are important because people are inherently valuable and because our differences are what enable us to contribute creatively to the world. I want to see through your eyes how the world looks and feels, not because I want to change, but because your experience expands my vision. Like the poem (or fable) about a group of blind men describing an elephant, I don’t see reality exactly as it is nor do you. We need each other’s perspectives to grasp reality better.
I may not always like what your opinion or experience shows me, and I’m sure you don’t always appreciate what my eccentricities show you. Making room for each other declutters our lives of self-righteousness and arrogance, and it might bring that peace and calm, that yutori, we’re seeking as we move through the world.
photo courtesy of ThePhotoQueue