Each room where you live holds an echo of everything you've ever felt or done there, and as you fill it with echoes the rooms become defined - they begin to exist in a space beyond the physical. If you were to worry too much or cry too often in the kitchen, then the splashing of your tears would fill up the room, they'd bounce off the tiles, felt but not heard every time you make a meal. If you were to laugh in your bedroom - full-bodied and uproariously - the carpet would hold the wheezing and the soreness in your face. Traces of them would begin to enter your dreams. Your walls remember what music you listened to yesterday and in time they will want more of it - a record played in a room five times sounds so much better during its sixth go around on the turntable. When you have friends over for dinner, the warmth between you hangs there, swirling like smoke from an extinguished candle - you could run your finger along the edge of it. A room in a house filled with sadness bounces sadness back, a room in a house filled with love wraps you up in it.
Other spaces behave this way - see, for instance, how while driving in a car rage on the road begets rage on the road. Once yelling at another is permitted in the vehicle, it's so much easier to do. And so on and so forth, until the car becomes just a space of anger. Were you, instead, to only ever sing along to disco on the radio, not allowing anger to enter the space, then your car would become a place for singing along. Or say you take the subway, and when you take the subway you put in your little earplugs and you calmly read a magazine. You would eventually become calm when even considering the idea of riding the subway.
We can't prevent our feelings from happening, of course. We can't say arbitrarily that we do not allow jealousy to enter our living rooms - sometimes jealousy, which is really a combination of anger and longing, simply arrives - we have no choice in the matter. But there is a certain amount of encouraging of the desirable that can happen. We can say - out loud, if necessary - that I want this space to be a space of joy, or I want this space to be a space of serenity, or I want this space to be a space of deep and fulfillable longing. And the opposite is true, too - we can say we don't want this space to be a space of irritation, or of cynicism. We can gently coax the places we inhabit into shape, and in turn we gently coax ourselves along, and then the spaces where we live and breathe and commute coax us in return.
Relationships with other people can also be seen as a room - an infinitely complex room, a space with uncountable walls, but a space nonetheless. Our interactions with other people define the world for us, sometimes more deeply than wherever our physical bodies might be at the time. And, similar to deciding that a space should be filled with contentment and free of ill temper, we can fill the space between people with the feelings and actions we wish that space to hold. If you allow for ease and lightness, then ease and lightness will come more freely, increasing bit by bit as the space becomes defined. And naturally that space can hold the negative, terrible things, too - if you allow yourself to feel resentment or annoyance then these will become the defining characteristics of that space.
What is challenging about the spaces in-between people is that, in order to become wonderful, both people involved must actively allow the goodness in, and with nearly equal desire. If one person wants there to be goodness and the other person feels only negative feelings, the negative feelings will certainly dominate the space. It's not enough for one person to want things to be good, right, fulfilling, happy - if the other person feels slighted, still upset, dismissive, etc, then these negative feelings absolutely define the vibe between them. And then, what's more, is that the spaces between people change tremendously anytime another person is involved, and we are constantly interacting with a mass of other people and their various spaces, even when we speak to each other directly, one-on-one. We are, ultimately, the sum of the spaces we inhabit, and so when you talk with another you are talking with the vibe of their bedroom, the vibe between them and their coworkers, the vibe of their morning commute.
It's no coincidence, too, that the amalgam of thoughts, desires, inputs, and feelings that can maybe be called consciousness is often called our mental space - we exist as a little candle flame in the center of these swirling forces, we are a shorting floor lamp in the center of a room. It makes sense that we imagine our brain / emotional / cognitive state as a room. It's a convenient metaphor - is the space untidy, or is it sparkling clean and totally under control? Is it spare, or is it crammed full of shit? Do we ever just simply like to be there? In the room of experience our lives and ourselves, what echoes of feelings do we allow? And what do we put up on the walls? Are we permitting the things we want in the spaces we are part of?
We are held and outlined by the spaces we inhabit. I imagine you lying on a large sheet of butcher paper, me describing your silhouette with a sharpie. But we are also somewhat in control of the spaces, and as we shape the spaces we shape ourselves. I imagine a marble statue of a sculptor shaping itself, the stone sands back.