It’s amazing what a little bit of space can do.

    Consider the word extraordinary. If I put in a little bit of space between the a and the o it becomes extra ordinary. Weirdly enough as a word, extraordinary, seems like the absence of the ordinary rather than an extra amount of it. That little space makes an enormous difference in meaning. 

    Those five letters extra convey an entirely different sense when they stand alone compared to when they form a prefix. Remarkably extraordinary isn’t extraordinary at all when it stands alongside of words like extraterrestrial or extramarital. As a prefix it means extraneous to or outside of as opposed to more of as it does when standing alone. 

    Sometimes I really feel compassion for the folk who have to learn English as a second language with its weird vocabulary and grammar structures. It is extraordinary indeed!

    But let’s think together about little spaces anyway.

So there, I just gave you one. I put in a section break rather than a paragraph break. Doing so got your brain to pause, ever so slightly, to be ready to start in with a fresh go at things. 

    So here that go goes. Recently I’ve had a learning experience with little spaces in dealing with Laird. 

    You might remember Laird from last month’s blog. If not, then I’ve reposted that blog below. In brief summary, I decided to incarcerate my friend, Laird. In doing so I was setting him free. Laird is a set of musical riffs but I think of him as a musical friend. The incarceration involved committing him to a sequence of black dots on the vertical and horizontal lines of a printable musical score. Because I did this Laird now has the freedom of going onto other musicians who might very well play him differently than I do. 

    The tricky part to getting Laird onto musical score was the rhythm. I could get the sequence of notes okay, and the nest of harmony underneath him, but the beat was hard. Little spaces were needed to get the notes to flow properly. In music we call those little places rests. The rests are kind of like commas and periods, they can be of different lengths just like a comma is a shorter break in the flow of a sentence than a period is at the end.

    Oh, just to bring you up to date. In the time between the last blog and this one Laird has had the experience of being played on handbells, first by the arranger and now by another ringer. Laird will have me along for this experience as I’m playing my digital piano alongside of the bells. I’ll stay well in the background to let his most important riffs really shine on those bells. But there are some parts of Laird too tricky for the bells to manage, so I’ll play a couple of the really complicated riffs; you know, just to help Laird out. After all, that’s what friends are for, right? 

    But the point of it all is that his sequence of notes really benefited from those little spaces. The spaces created a chunking of the notes, making the riffs more meaningful and listenable. It is amazing what a little space can do.

I’ve retired from four decades as a mental health professional. I was the psychotherapy kind of mental health professional rather than the case management kind. The work of a psychotherapist requires nuance and sensitivity. While in therapeutic conversation I was continuously monitoring the client’s emerging emotion and thoughts. Often the most significant of those emergent elements are signalled by little spaces in the flow of our conversational exchange.

    A way of thinking about my client’s stories was that they’re a bit like musical riffs, one thing of note after another. Sometimes these stories flowed really quickly as clients told the sequence of events, what they did and said and what others did and said in response. But every once in a while there would be a little break in that flow, one of those little spaces. That break was a signal to me that a different mental process was going on for the client, perhaps an intrusion of emotion or even a new sense of meaning in the story. I used to think about it as an insert from the subconscious mind, that mental processing going on beneath our awareness. When something is ready to pop up, a little space is made for it. 

    Sometimes I’d just notice that it had happened, not having a sense of what it might be about but not drawing attention to it so as not to interfere with the client’s narrative. Then I would go back later to ask to hear more about that part of the story. Emotions could break through then, for acceptance and release, or a new way of looking at things could become possible. 

There are spaces in our day-to-day lives. I had a big one seven years ago when I retired. I was empty and exhausted for about a year. It wasn’t a period, nor a paragraph, nor a section break, not even a chapter break. It was a big enough break to allow the appearance of Part Three in my life story. The break created an occasion for personal reflection on my life’s work. I’m still integrating what I experienced in the therapy room into my understanding of the human condition, both its pain and struggles and also the elements of creativity and meaning making.

    Perhaps after reading this blog you may start to notice those little spaces when a thought or a feeling breaks through seemingly from out of nowhere. It is not from nowhere at all, but from a somewhere really vital within you. 

    And that iconic Leonard Cohen song just might shine through too, the one with those extraordinary lyrics about there being a crack in everything.

Now  here is last month's blog if you want to read more about my musical friend, Laird.

I recently incarcerated a friend.

For the purpose of this blog I’ll call him Laird. Laird has always been able to calm me when I’ve been feeling stressed. Additionally, he’s taken me to some wild and beautiful places. 

Why would I ever do such a thing?

Laird is not a people friend but a musical one, a sequence of riffs with a harmonic and rhythmic structure. Laird’s incarceration was not behind bars but between bar lines. My incarceration involved stretching him out on the musical staff as a line of black dots.

Laird has enjoyed freedom of movement for years, ever deepening his lyricism and quirkiness. When I play him, he has a decidedly Celtic character, always eliciting feelings of wistful contentment. The folk at the coffeeshop really like him.

In incarcerating Laird to lay on the lines and spaces of a musical score I can pass him forward to be played by others. Thanks to his incarceration he’s going to be played in an arrangement for handbells, a solo ringer playing his riffs while I provide the accompanying harmony on the digital piano.

But it all has been incredibly hard, this incarceration. And I know to call it that is totally irrational, but it’s how I felt doing it. 

Upon reflection, I believe it was the right thing to do. I also think it’ll be good for Laird. 

I’m doing something else different in this month’s blog, riding it piggyback on a previous one. I’ve appended below my blog from January entitled “On being right, wrongly.” If you’re still intrigued by the ideas for this month, or you just need to have another cup of coffee and something to read while you enjoy it, it’ll be there for you. 

So, getting back to Laird. 

I discovered something in creating Laird’s musical score with the help of a musician skilled in arranging for the handbells. When I’m composing music I don’t always put the same number of beats in each measure. Sometimes there will be four, sometimes three, sometimes five. After I got Laird’s sequence of notes down, the arranger placed it into proper musical notation. To match my rhythm in playing Laird he had to put in bars of 3/4 and 5/4 timing as well as the 4/4. 

My arranger friend assures me that some other musical compositions (the formal, serious kind of music) have different time signatures within the composition. However, a part of me wishes Laird had naturally laid himself out in an orderly pattern with a consistent beat throughout. So we’re working on it. In asking other musicians to play Laird it would only seem right and proper that his riffs would read in a more consistent fashion like that.

But another part of me is delighted Laird moves to his own rhythmic structure when he’s just with me. That feels good too. Which brings me back to the theme of the earlier blog (the one you are going to read next). There’s a significant difference between right and good.

The difference comes down to context. If our context is collective, rightness of behaviour serves the benefit of all. As a society, we benefit from everyone stopping at stoplights. Amateur musicians, like our handbell ensemble, will more easily handle a musical score with the same number of beats to a bar. However, if our context is interpersonal goodness is important. Goodness allows us adapt to the intrinsic and unique spirit of the other. That’s what happens with my Laird when I play him solo. 

We need to strive to do the right thing in society but need to strive to do good things in relationships. 

My experience as a psychologist also had to balance right and good. I had to abide by the ethical codes and culture of my profession, both were very focused on whether or not individual practitioners were doing the right thing. But the therapy room was a place of conversation with one other person, a dance of interlacing subjectivities. I had to be good there. While I invariantly engaged some rightnesses as defined by my profession (e.g. respecting personal boundaries, focusing only on the wellbeing of the client) some other things, things typically labeled as the right thing to do, had to give way to make room for goodness. Right labelling (diagnosis) was less important than truly understanding the subjective distress of the client. A therapy protocol designated as “best practice”, and thus the right approach, may be ineffective or harmful given the personality and context of the individual. 

Let’s think of rightness and goodness as inhabiting two different realms. Rightness engages linear causality: we do this to that to get a result. If it works, then it was the right thing to do. On the other hand, goodness works within complex systems such that each good input filters into the output of a network of dynamic, interacting variables. 

Within the complexity of human relationships acts of goodness beget more goodness, contributing to and altering the emergent properties of the complex system. Emergent properties of a complex human system would include wellness, emotional richness and balance, and responsible behaviour. Acts of goodness may take on many forms including kindness and graciousness, but also truthfulness, good personal boundaries and refusal to take part in toxic or harmful interactions. 

So getting back to my friend, Laird. One of the things I can be good about is letting Laird be different when he’s being played by others. In our culture it is expected that music is learned from a written score, practiced and performed. So in the context of how music is generally heard, what I did is the right thing to do.

In the long run, incarcerating Laird has provided him with yet a new freedom, to enter new imaginations through handbells rather than just my piano. Perhaps he needn’t be bound by the wistful contentment he has always been with me. And that’d be a good thing too.