A few days ago I wrote on Linkedin about Hayao Miyazaki’s deliberate use of what he calls “empty space” in his films. He refers to it as the Japanese concept of ‘ma’. I see it as a an antidote to the overwhelming pace of modern life.

This concept stands for silence, emptiness, pauses, breaks, nothingness. Moments where nothing is happening, where you can let your mind wander, or you can just be, nothing needs to be done, nothing needs to happen.

I thought it was a fascinating concept that I didn’t seem to have known about before.

And of course this concept is very different from the way many of us grow up in the West. Life, school or work all teach us that we need to constantly fill those empty moments with something.

And technology seems to be the worst culprit these days. We believe we have no time for so many things, yet when we do have time, we pull out our phones and mindlessly and aimlessly scroll ourselves into a state of oblivion and numbness.

But it is this empty space (or negative space in art), a pause, a silence, that gives time and space to be, that invites imagination, to breathe and to have nothing to do.

Isn’t that a good feeling? A feeling or a relief?

Years ago I took up photography again as a hobby. And after a while of posting on Instagram, someone commented on my use of negative space.

I hadn’t noticed it until that moment. Or at least not thought about it. That negative space was part of almost all my images. For me it was always part of the story I wanted to tell, or the story I saw. And I felt that the viewer could fill it with their own ideas, rather than giving it all away.

Just like the concept of Ma.

And just like that emptiness in art, there seems to be a yearning for more of that in the corporate world.

I know, at first glance these things don’t seem to go together. But if you take a second look, you realise that the corporate world has become all about hustle, performance, salaries, doing more, being more, but certainly nothing is ever enough.

Unsatisfying.

Maybe this is where some undoing is needed. Some unlearning of how to do nothing, moment by moment.

It’s about lightness and finding joy again at work, at home or in life.

I think it’s also a freedom from the constant need to perform or impress, a freedom that Fran Lebowitz talks about when she says: “I don’t care what people think of me. I don’t think about them at all.

Find more from me on LinkedIn, message me there or send me an email – I’d love to hear from you. Thank you for reading.