White Space in a Busy Season

As we look out upon glazed roads and white-brushed landscapes, the natural white space has an important lesson in what sometimes seems to be the busiest time of the year.

That’s because it provides natural white space. And in the world of design and art, the concept of white space is central.

In music, for instance, white space can be pauses, quiet sections or longer notes in music. If a piece is all quick notes with no respite, it tends to have less shape and direction than music with notes of different lengths, and variety with volume is also important.

In newspaper, magazine or book design, no one wants to read something with no margins or spaces between the words, or separation of some sort between paragraphs. That’s why the invention of spaces between words, for instance, was so revolutionary.

There is a reason the first page of a chapter tends to be pleasing to the eye — there is a lot of white space both to provide separation between sections and introduction to new ideas.

In drawings and paintings, if every square centimeter is filled with lines and texture and detail, it can be overwhelming. There needs to be some “plain” section — background, solid colors, something to set off the subject of the piece.

It’s why portrait artists rarely draw a complex background; the person’s face is the main point of the work. And even a face isn’t always full of details; the eyes are the focal point and are full of details like shadows, lines, eyelashes, eyebrows and colors — yet they are surrounded with areas of less detail like the cheeks, forehead and nose, which draw the light.

The beauty of art, though, is that there are lessons to be drawn even about our own lives. It’s not just limited to a paint-daubed canvas or ephemeral music: the concepts we explore artistically are just concrete ways of exploring what sometimes look just like abstract concepts in our lives.

This is particularly important to remember in a season full of white space and overwhelming business — winter, and especially the Christmas season.

I hate the cold, but almost everyone I know loves how snow looks — including me. It provides that white space that allows us to focus on other details, like the bowed-down, bristling branches of the evergreen tree, or the delicate tinkling icicles hanging from the lip of every home’s roof.

The same applies to the temperature. Again, I am no fan of the cold, especially of subzero temperatures like we have had recently. (I clearly live in the wrong state for that.) But what’s interesting about cold is that it is the absence of heat. Motion generates heat; cold, by its nature, tries to freeze us into immobility.

Immobility is the key. Cold temperatures slow and eventually stop water’s motion, causing ice. Snow and ice can lead to road closure (we all know this by the Sisters). Closer to home, extreme cold can cause frostbite, meaning it slows and eventually stops your body’s workings, starting with the most exposed skin such as your nose and fingers. But if you are ever in a life-threatening situation, what’s your body’s priority? To protect the core — your extremities are important, but it’s more important to keep your heart, your lungs, your brain and all your other vital organs functioning. 

In order to survive in the cold, especially extreme cold, you have to keep moving. But you also have to prioritize; you want to move, but you generally need to move toward something, especially somewhere warm. It does no one much good to be doing jumping jacks to stave off hypothermia when you’re only 15 feet from a warm building.

In a season of frantic busyness — with a flurry of holidays, shopping, end-of-year events, school concerts, family visits, travels, final exams and more — snow, the quintessential white space, holds a special reminder for us, as does nearly everything else associated with snow and cold.

As we work to get through one of the busiest holidays of the year, this is a good time to remember that there is a reason for the season. Your holiday doesn’t have to be perfect, and likely won’t be. (After all, very little, if anything, ever is perfect.) But the white spaces around us are a reminder to allow background things to stay where they belong — in the background. And at the same time, we can’t freeze in place and wait for life to pass us by.

It’s easy to let things like presents, food, events and the need for perfection take center stage, but in reality, most of those are background — not white space, but more like white noise that can distract from what’s most important.

Especially in a season where anxiety and depression are rampant, it’s vital to take at least a few minutes whenever needed to refocus on what’s really important, and a good way to do that is to step back and ask why the holiday was set aside in the first place. Christmas songs like “Silent Night” are a good reminder of that. “Silent Night” is a very simple hymn and is in fact like a lullaby, arguably one of the simplest types of music there is. But that doesn’t mean it is silent or that its meaning is unimportant, just that distractions have generally been cleared away, or at least sent to the background.

At the end of the year, in the midst of ice, interstate closures, subzero temperatures, delicate snowflakes and thick blankets of snow, this is a good time to reevaluate priorities and establish enough white space so you can spend time and energy on who and what are most important.