True Richness Is Spaciousness
Perhaps like you, each year I choose a few words to describe the way I want to feel. This year, one of my three words was ‘rich’.
Not rich in the way that word usually gets used. Rich in the fuller sense, the nooks and crannies of life: the texture, the tapestry of it, the feeling that comes from a life of depth, not just a life that looks full from the outside.
For a long time, I measured a good life the way most of us are taught to: by what I could accomplish, acquire, prove.
These days I measure it differently. The metric that actually matters to me now is s p a c i o u s n e s s.
I'm talking about the ability to move fluidly between the things that make up a full life, without any one of them swallowing the rest. A sauna morning followed by client work followed by a workout followed by cooking dinner followed by time with a book followed by quality time as a family. None of it rushed. None of it competing for the same sliver of time.
That's what I actually want. Not a bigger life. A wider one.
It's easy to build a life that looks abundant from the outside and feels narrow from the inside, packed, scheduled, optimized within an inch of its life, with no room left to toggle. I've built that version before. It's efficient. It's also exhausting, and it leaves no space for the parts of you that don't show up on a calendar.
Spaciousness isn't necessarily about doing less. It's about being ruthlessly clear on what you value, aligning with that (which could be adding things), and editing out as much of the rest as possible.
I think this is what a lot of people are actually chasing when they chase money. Sometimes it's the prestige, or the power, or the optics. But underneath a lot of that, what people really want is the freedom and flexibility that comes with it. The room to move.
Margin isn't free. It takes editing, values clarity, and often, yes, resources, used intentionally, in service of the life you actually want, not the one that just looks good.
Questions for you to consider:
Where does your life feel full but not spacious?
What would you need to edit or subtract to create more margin?
What do you need to add to be more values-aligned?
If spaciousness were your metric for success instead of achievement, what would change?