Space is infrastructure

She handled the crisis beautifully.

Her computer crashed. She spent days troubleshooting, then replacing it, then restoring everything, then learning the new system. It wasn't fun. But she had space for it to happen, and so it was fine.

Here's the part that's easy to miss: the crisis wasn't what broke her.

What broke her was what came after. She'd rescheduled a few things during the tech meltdown, and they all landed in the same week. Suddenly the calendar that had felt spacious was wall-to-wall. The things she actually wanted to do felt heavier than the emergency she'd just navigated.

She preferred the work she was doing this week. That wasn't the issue. The issue was there was no room left for surprises. No margin. No air.

And that's when the 4am wake-ups started.

Here's something she said that I keep coming back to:

"Don't book back-to-back stuff with a one-hour lunch and call it good. That's not enough."

It sounds so obvious when you say it out loud. Of course you need more than an hour in the middle of a packed day. Of course surprises happen. Of course you can't schedule yourself at 100% capacity and expect to feel human.

And yet.

How many of us build our weeks exactly this way? We look at the calendar, see a gap, and fill it. We treat empty space like inefficiency instead of infrastructure.

But space isn't wasted time. Space is what lets you stay yourself when the unexpected shows up.

She'd just come back from a working trip where everything flowed. She painted every day. She wrote. She said no to anything that didn't fit.

But here's what made it work: it wasn't that she did less. She was productive. She created things. She held space for others.

The difference was she had margin built in. Not scheduled relaxation—just room. Room for a conversation to go long. Room for an idea to emerge. Room to respond to what actually happened instead of racing to the next thing.

When she came home, that margin disappeared. Not because she chose poorly, but because the old structure was waiting for her. Back-to-back. Wall-to-wall. A one-hour lunch and call it good.

Think about a week when you felt like yourself. When ideas came easily. When you could handle the curveballs without losing your center.

I'd bet there was more space in that week than you realized.

Not empty time, necessarily. But buffer. Transition. The ability to finish one thing and take a breath before the next thing began. That space isn't a luxury. It's what allows everything else to work.

When we eliminate margin, we don't just lose comfort. We lose access to ourselves. The creative thinking disappears. The patience evaporates. We start operating from a contracted, reactive place instead of the grounded center we know is available.

The calendar looks efficient. But we're not.

This isn't about quitting your job or abandoning your commitments. It's about looking honestly at how you've structured your time and asking: where's the room for life?

Not life as in vacation. Life as in the unexpected. The conversation that needs to go longer. The idea that wants to emerge. The transition between contexts that your nervous system actually requires.

What if you stopped treating empty space as something to fill?

What if margin wasn't a luxury but a requirement?

The woman I was talking with already knew this. She'd lived it for a month. The question wasn't whether it was possible. The question was whether she'd protect it now that she was back in the current of normal life.

• The crisis isn't usually what breaks you—it's the compression that follows

• Space isn't wasted time; it's what allows you to stay yourself when surprises happen

• A calendar at 100% capacity might look efficient, but it eliminates access to your creativity and center

Where's the margin in your week?

Not the scheduled self-care. The actual buffer between things. The room for a meeting to run long without cascading into chaos.

If you can't find it, that might be the most important thing to notice.

Steve

P.S. She said something that stuck with me: "I need to have space for life." Not space instead of life. Space for it. There's a difference.