66. Yutori [ゆとり]: living with spaciousness
In Japan, there is a concept called "yutori" [ゆとり], and it is spaciousness. Source: Meaning of ゆとり in Japanese
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.
I think this way of being, of being "spacious", is a very special skill and people immediately notices when they are in the presence of someone who is cultivating it.
From a conversation with her Japanese student, poet Naomi Shihab Nye explains,
It’s 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.
[The Japanese student] gave all these different definitions of what yutori was to her. But one of them was: “After you read a poem, just knowing you can hold it — 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.”
Shihab Nye relates this to poetry when she continues:
I think that’s the essence of — a kind of exchange is what poetry is interested in too: the feeling that you’re not battered by thought in a poem, but you are sort of as if you’re riding the wave of thought; as if you’re allowing thought to enter. You’re shifting. You’re changing. You’re looking. You are in a sensibility that allows you that sort of mental, emotional, spiritual interaction with everything around you. I think it’s very, very helpful for mental health, actually.
I really wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to live without that apprehension that you could have a thought, shape a thought, change a thought, look at the words in a thought — that you could take a word and just use that word — I think I’ve said this 40 years ago in a poem — use a single word as an oar that could get you through the days just by holding a word, thinking about it differently, and seeing how that word rubs against other words, how it interplays with other words. There’s a luxury in that kind of thinking about language and text, but it’s very basic, as well. It’s simple. It’s invisible. It doesn’t cost anything.
I made a list of other yutori examples:
- settling in; allowing the nervous system to regulate and return to homeostasis and ease.
- being a slow talker; taking time to pause gently during conversations; giving room to make sure the other person has finished sharing their thoughts.
- being okay with not having an opinion on things; allowing space to not know.
- meditation; sitting quietly to focus on your breathing, thoughts, sensations in your body or things you can sense around you
~ taking it easy,
<3 K