Making Meanings

It’s funny how a single word could possess so many meanings. Yesterday while watching Button Poetry (refer to previous post) I came across a poem “Phases”:

They (Kevin Kantor and Sienna Burnett) talk about the different ways in which this simple word is used.

“I’m just going through a phase.”

“The process of waxing an waning.”

You get the gist.

The word I thought I would make meaning of was: SPACE.

With time it has come to mean so many things to me. Earlier when I was at school, all it meant was a physical tangible space.

Then there was the phase when I realised what sadness was and started spacing out. I don’t know how it was for you but I distinctly remember this phase in my life when I started getting sad and depressed and this depression lasted for hours. Maybe it was during puberty maybe later but there was this point when it all changed! That was also when I started ‘Daydreaming’. There are so many instances where I just space/phase out and lose track of what is happening. Daydreaming is just an old hobby of mine. I guess when you have to reach out to a world happier than your present one, there is no other option.

In my relationships with people, we talked about “our space”, the times when we needed space which we would not have to share. Needing space essentially means getting away and taking a break. This particular space also talks about a mental space. What you want is to have that person out of sight, out of mind. Sometimes the other person needed more space, sometimes I did. This was a hard one because someone always suffered.

Then when I came to college, space became this huge thing to be researched about. It is one of those elements of life which you don’t credit as much as it deserves. There was talk of “safe space” – a space where feminists like me could talk about our ideologies.

Safe space also reminds me of the need for a world where I could live the way I want to, without any restrictions and inhibitions. Space becomes such an important factor in your life when you really think about it.

Home. One of the most important spaces of your life. The place where you grow up, learn and then finally leave only to go to another space to make it your home, or a place which looks familiar to it.

And lastly, what I could think of, the space that this blog is, a space on the web, intangible. It’s not physical, not mental but a combination of the two and that makes it so so special.

That’s all that I could come up with, what is your meaning of space? 🙂