Inbetween Spaces

Transcript

I’d like to talk about in-between places.

I am still here in Queretaro in my little apartment on top of this house here, you might hear some sounds from the street. You might hear birds chirping, motorcycles passing in the street.

In this little apartment doorways are quite low as a lot of them are in Queretaro because of the diminutive stature of people in the past. Mexicans a lot of them were and are quite short. So I passed through a doorway I have to watch my head being 188 cm tall.

I was thinking about that today, about my head and about those in-between places, places of transition.

Now these are places that in a sense its important to be conscious in these places. It gives us an opportunity to be aware that our environment was changing. We’re stepping into a different zone. I thought about that episode of Charmed, that tv show from the 90s in one of the episodes the witches meet a little girl who says “You’ve got to take care of the tween places, that’s where the tween fairies live.”

Those little troublesome tween fairies in doorways and other transitional places.

I also thought about the between places in life because I see it happen with people so often and it is a cause of much distress when they are putting themselves in a tween place so they’re at a crossroads in life so instead of saying firmly I’m going in this direction or I’m going in that direction, they say I don’t know which way I will go.

Stuck in that position they wait and feel the increased stress of not knowing what to do.

This is a bit unusual but Im thinking about Macbeth, the play. Of course the character of Lady Macbeth is one of the unforgettable parts of the play. There’s a part where Lady Macbeth gives a famous speech to Thane Macbeth and tells him “Will you be waiting there going back and forth like the damned cat in the adage?”

You can immediately get this image of the cat not wanting to go out of the door, not wanting to stay in. Waiting by the door when you open for the cat he returns back inside.

The adage she was talking about is still common in French. The refrain goes something like “the cat wants to fish but doesn’t want to get it’s feet wet.”

So you want something so bad that you’re not willing to pay the price, not willing to make the decision. In that same impassioned speech where Macbeth says “that’s quite gruesome”.

She says “If I had wanted something as I had wanted this, though I had suckled my babe at my bosom. If the situation so demanded I would have picked up a rock and dashed his bloody brains out.”

We can criticize Lady Macbeth, well we don’t have to, we can see that her methods are mistaken. The goal, the vision is mistaken. One thing not mistaken, beyond criticism is her resolve that desire that fixedness to say yes this is what I will do. Nothing will stop me.

Or as Ayn Rand put it in the Fountainhead someone might ask Howard Roark you wouldn’t ask him what might he do if he weren’t an architect? No You ask what would he be if he could not be an architect?

He would walk over corpses to be an architect, oh yes resolve is that strong. That is quite serious.

To lighten the mood a little bit I will tell you this story which might demonstrate the point in a simpler way. I was in Thailand, I think I was outside Saraburi province and I was going to renew my stay in Thailand. They gave me a month as a tourist and the option to renew, I just had to go to the immigration office, ask and put a fee.

I go to the immigration office and for some reason it’s like 30 kilometers out of town. They say “Oh you need some photos” and I go “where do I get them?” There must be a place nearby and they tell me it’s in town.

I asked some Australian fellows and they said “Oh, we went to this place in the city.”

So I walk out, go to the 7/11 or whatever it is and ask in Thai “Where are the taxis” and they said “there are not taxi’s”. So I went onto the road and Im on this highway. I don’t know which of these ways will be easier to get a print shop where they will do me a passport photo. I walk back and forth unable to make a decision.

I didn’t know what to do, it was quite a desperate situation actually and I started to feel desperate.

In some moment I said “There are two ways, if I go one way and find its not the right direction I can simply change my direction and my decision.”

I walked about 10 minutes of walking and found a bus stop and waited at the bus stop. I asked the people where it went and they confirmed.

I arrived, someone in the collective or shuttle bus was kind enough to go out of her way, kinder than she needed to be because she was in a hurry.

But she showed me a photo shop and I got the photos and that’s all it took.

All it took was to make a decision and that was the end of my distress. Perhaps if you find yourself in an in-between place perhaps you can make a simple decision, cleave off the other possibilities and move into the new space.