White space: the unprinted area of a piece of printing, as of a poster or newspaper page, or of a portion of a piece of printing, as of an advertisement; blank or empty space

We are a society sorely short on white space. Our spaces are burgeoning with print, noise, activity, stimulation and stuff of every size, shape, and color. We are full to the gills, bloated beyond description. If, by some miracle, we are afforded an unscheduled half hour, we fill it, congratulating ourselves on time-management wizardry. And if we discover stuffless space in our homes or workplaces, we either haul in more stuff or distribute the stuff we already have to fill it. Even–or perhaps especially–in its human form, nature abhors a vacuum.

German typographer and book designer Jan Tschichold writes:

White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background.  

In design, as in life, there is much to be said about white space as an active element. Used actively and intentionally, white space can be an entry space for the viewer, claims German artist Norbert Bisky, a space where you can get into it [the piece of art]. Could it be that we choose to see the white spaces of our lives as passive so that we might justify our fevered attempts to avoid entry into self-reflection? Could it be that we simply don’t want to get into our lives any more than we can explore in a 33 character-tweet?

I admit that I have looked into white space–as a writer and a human–and cowered in its face. At best, it proffered possibilities, at worst, nullity ad infinitum. At times, it rolled in like heavy fog. Wave upon wave of vapor so dense, so consuming that I could see nothing but the specter of my own heart, hear nothing but the rambling of my own mind. Mine was a Gothic tale that not even Stephen King could pen. Scary stuff, indeed.

Scary–but necessary. Without it, there is a very real chance that we will become (collectively and permanently) a people who do but cannot be. Ask any parent or teacher to recall the number of times they’ve heard their children or students claim that they are bored, and you will hear a shot of disdain heard round the world. Boredom is the battle cry of those who loathe (and fear) white space. I’m bored. This is boring. What else can I do? Is this all there is? Today more than ever, parents and teachers must meet this barrage of boredom with miraculous, on-demand remedies. They must sweep in like cruise directors of ships that have gone tragically aground. They must whip out their bags of tricks and sort through their contents in search of something newer and better. Their reputations as good parents and successful teachers depend upon it.

In her article, “Let Children Get Bored Again” (The New York Times, Feb. 2, 2019). Pamela Paul writes:

. . . boredom is something to experience rather than hastily swipe away. And not as some kind of cruel Victorian conditioning, recommended because it’s awful and toughens you up. Despite the lesson most adults learned growing up — boredom is for boring people — boredom is useful. It’s good for you.

What? Boredom is for boring people? Boredom is useful, good for you? So claims Paul who goes on to argue that until a few decades ago, we believed that a certain amount of boredom was actually necessary and appropriate. In her article she cites composer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda (in an interview with GQ magazine) who attributed his unscheduled afternoons with fostering inspiration because there is nothing better to spur creativity than a blank page or an empty bedroom. I contend that the world is a much better place because Miranda’s blank pages and empty bedrooms spurred the likes of Hamilton.

Paul admits that it’s not really boredom itself that’s important but what we do with it. She explains:

The idea isn’t that you suffer through crushing tedium. . . [but] that you learn how to vanquish it. This may come in several forms: You might turn inward and use the time to think. You might reach for a book. You might imagine your way to a better job. Boredom leads to flights of fancy. But ultimately, to self-discipline. To resourcefulness.

Boredom, like white space, begs for vanquishing. But we have stopped expecting and teaching our children (and adults) to be vanquishers. Before I retired, my students were hard-pressed to listen to a lecture of any length. Boring, they said. Listening to teachers drone on and on is SOOO boring. Reading for more than 5 minutes? REALLY boring! Homework? Absolute drudgery! And rather than train them to listen longer, read and work more intently, too often I confess that I moved all too naturally into entertainment. I used to joke that I’d become the David Letterman of the secondary English classroom. I could recite Top Ten lists created for my students’ educational pleasure (Educational? Who was I kidding?) I could tell stories to lead into and out of classic pieces of literature, glittering tales intended to make our work more relevant. I could show a video–a really fine adaption of a literary work–to make the difficult more palatable. My bag of tricks was deep. And oh, so shallow.

Blessedly, I fought the good fight more times than not. Still, I cringe when I recall the times I caved and worked the crowd like a starving stand-up comedian. I regret that I didn’t roll out some white space and simply shut up. I am saddened that more of my students didn’t enter this space actively and expectantly. I am disappointed that they failed to understand the necessity and value of spending time there.

Some may argue that we just don’t have time for white space in our curricula if we are to make our students college and career-ready. Still others may insist that we can’t lose our kids to boredom if we are to keep their eyes on their respective educational and vocational prizes. Pamela Paul, however, counters by asserting that teaching children to endure boredom rather than ratcheting up the entertainment will prepare them for a more realistic future, one that doesn’t raise false expectations of what work or life itself actually entails.

Perhaps our current fear and dislike of white space and the boredom that may accompany it will give rise to a whole new professional development industry. Students or employees bored, powerless before the blank page, paralyzed by unscheduled, unsupervised time? We can send our White Space Trainers to your school or workplace today! (Can’t you just imagine the power point presentations and training sessions designed to raise test scores and improve graduation rates through well-designed white space development?)

Seriously though, we have a white space crisis before us. I’m all for raising up a new generation of vanquishers, emboldened–not frightened–by the boredom and the mental, emotional, and spiritual spaces they encounter.

 
 On Your Birthday
 
For years, he wrapped his best gift
 into a single sheet of typing paper
 and tucked it in the corner of your vanity mirror.
 And there, your husband’s words,
 like spring’s first crocus, 
 pushed their snowy heads eagerly
 into the gray days of winter.
 Each birthday, they took careful root in the only
 seed bed worth tending.
 
 To his best reader,
 to the love—oh, the love of his life!
 To the home he carried with him
 into and out of the dark places that might have undone him, 
 but for you. 
 To the one who makes do, who takes little
 and gives much.
 To the loveliest of all the birds he kept,
 the one whose silver wings flash like bright berries
 in the junipers.
 
 And now the words are left to me.
 I can hear my father’s fingers on his Royal typewriter,
 the quick slap of thumb and forefingers,
 the blue rush of each carriage return.
 I can feel the round keys give themselves, as they must,
 to a rhythm preordained. 
 And the small metal stand with wings that unfold 
 to hold notebooks and such
 quakes with each image pounded into life.
  
 Now, the words he gifted--
 so many words spilling from line to line, 
 jumping the white spaces of the decades--
 now, this word cache strains against the grave.
  
 And so, on your birthday,
 consider this a single page tucked into the corner
 of your vanity. 
 Consider that the old black Royal lumbers on
 with humble words unearthed from the genetic soil 
 of the one who loves you
 always. 


With all my love, Shannon

Curated: carefully chosen and thoughtfully organized or presented

I don’t think I have ever spoken or written the word curate or curator but a handful of times in my entire life. Though I love art–and had once planned to pursue a college art major–truthfully, I am pretty clueless about the role and work of a curator, one who carefully chooses and thoughtfully presents the artistic works that appear in galleries and museums. This world, the world of a genuine curator, is filet mignon to my Hamburger Helper. It floats and lilts, while I trod and plod. This is the world of those chosen few who have devoted their lives to the study of great artists, to the history of artistic styles and trends, to the standards by which we judge what is artistically sublime and what is merely good. In short, this is the world of a chosen few.

Or it was the world of a chosen few. Now, however, anything and everything is curated, which means anyone and everyone can be a curator. The world of curation has left the heavenly realms of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to take its place in countless Facebook photos and posts. Power in hand, we are currently curating the heck out of things.

In a 2009 New York Times article, “The Word ‘Curate’ No Longer Belongs to the Museum Crowd,” Alex Williams writes:

The word “curate,” lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes, has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting. In more print-centric times, the term of art was “edit” — as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully. But now, among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for “I have a discerning eye and great taste.” Or more to the point, “I belong.”

Oh to have a discerning eye and great taste! To belong to a group of others who, too, have discerning eyes and great taste! And to stand above, and in judgment of, those who lack such discernment and taste! For many, this is the stuff that great curation is made of now. Consider, for example, a lesson plan entitled Curated Lives for 10th graders from the website commonsense.org. The lesson designers frame the lesson with this statement:

Social media gives us a chance to choose how we present ourselves to the world. We can snap and share a pic in the moment or carefully stage photos and select only the ones we think are best. When students reflect on these choices, they can better understand the self they are presenting and the self they aim to be.

I suppose a lesson like this could go one of two ways: 1) teachers could help their students understand that the curated lives they present on social media are not their real lives OR 2) teachers could help students understand that they can curate their lives more effectively and thus, socially present their very best lives possible. This lesson may prompt some real soul-searching, or, sadly (and most likely), it may prompt more intentional curation of students’ social media selves. And all this in an estimated time of 50 minutes!

There are entire websites and blogs devoted to curating your life. From one such website, we read that The Curated Life is the pursuit of finding what makes living better. From another, we read: Curating your life means carefully choosing what you allow to shape your identity, atmosphere, relationships and sense of well-being. It is about realizing your worth and making choices that uphold your worth. You live full of hope for your future and curate your present life accordingly.

Curating your life is about shaping your identify, about realizing and upholding your worth? Scroll through Facebook or Instagram photos and posts at any moment on any given day, and you can find proof of this in a smorgasbord of faces and bodies, families and lives that are so much better than yours. These photos and posts shine with happiness and health. They dazzle with success and glitter with satisfaction. Such is the intended effect of curated lives: perfect family gatherings, brilliant selfies, achievements of every size and color. The rest of us who forgot the rolls and made the wrong kind of pie for the holiday dinner, whose wrinkles (or zits) have passed the point of any realistic photo editing, and whose greatest achievement is dusting at least once a month–well, we can just look on and weep.

Media scholar, Internet activist, and blogger Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Curators are great, but they’re inherently biased. Curators are always making an editorial decision. Those biases have really big implications.

Of course, curators are biased. And of course, they make editorial decisions that have really big implications. That’s the real point of curating, isn’t it? Presentation is everything. Whether it’s your home, your family or relationships, your personal or professional self, you can edit what you want others to see and what you do not. You can bias others towards what you want them to think. And the implications of this? Ideally, this all works in your favor. Others will look on in sore amazement at the curated you. They will “like” your photos and posts–or, at least, they will feel compelled to “like” them. For to disregard them would be to disregard what many others have “liked”, which would then make you an outsider, a real pantywaist in the curated world of social media.

The implications of curating our lives on social media and, in general, are often tragic. People claim that they must take mental health breaks from technology, to turn off their phones and to refrain from checking Facebook or Instagram. They claim that in order to keep their sanity and any sense of well-being, they have to stop the barrage of curated success and joy that continuously floods their screens. Cease and desist, they say. Or face the consequences of depression and FOMA (fear of missing out).

In an interview in The Guardian, Swiss art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist writes:

It’s worth thinking about the etymology of curating. It comes from the Latin word curare, meaning to take care. In Roman times, it meant to take care of the bath houses. In medieval times, it designated the priest who cared for souls.

I don’t think that curation today has much–if anything–to do with caring for souls. Perhaps it should, though. Perhaps the world would be a better place if curators were ones who cared more for their own and others’ souls than for finding the best angle and light for stunning selfies. Certainly, the implications of this type of curation would yield immeasurable benefits, for who among us couldn’t use some soul-tending? And you would never have to tune out or turn off from this kind of curation. Quite the contrary. You’d want to hang out with these kinds of curators because in their presence, you wouldn’t need a social media presence at all. You could just be present in the moment without feeling as though you needed to photograph or record it.

But there would also be challenges associated with this type of curation. Caring for the soul is the work of introspection, personal–not public work. This is internal work that is often quite messy. And this is work that would take time, quite possibly an entire lifetime.

Curation of the medieval kind would be a hard sell today. As we privately cared for our own and others’ souls, how would we know how many views we received or how many friends liked our work if we had no public platform? Without the validation of social media, how could we possibly continue curating?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I’m just convinced that these are the right questions to ask if we are ever to be the beneficiaries of genuinely and soulfully curated lives.