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January 15, 2015

Once a month I visit a man who, God willing, will be turning 93 in March. Pretty much every time I tell him it’s time for me to leave, he wants my assurance that I will come back to see him again, and he tells me how much he values my visit. I very much enjoy my time with him, yet I often leave wondering, “Why is this such a big deal to him? All I did was sit and let him talk for an hour.”

My husband thinks it’s funny any time I tell him about how bewildered I am when someone expresses this kind of positive feedback. To him, it’s obvious why they want to spend time with me. But then, he’s my husband. He’s obviously biased.

The other day I was talking to my friend Sharon, who finally explained it to me in words I could understand. “What you do,” she said, “is make space for other people to be.”

She’s right. That is what I do when I visit the elderly man once a month. It’s what I do when I greet people before services or other events at the synagogue. It’s what I do when congregants want to sit down with me to give me feedback. It’s what I do during Board meetings and committee meetings.

It’s something I’m good at for two reasons. First, I practice something I learned from Carl Rogers’s book, ““>Barry Oshry, who studies social systems, observed that, as humans, no matter what situation we’re in, we only have partial information. We don’t like it when there are gaps in our knowledge, so we make up stuff to fill in the gaps.

For instance, if someone walks through the door soaking wet, we may think, “Oh, it must be raining outside.” The trouble is, we tend to believe the stuff we make up is true, even though most of the time it’s not. Thus, we may make decisions based on false information, such as, “I’ll make myself a sandwich at home for lunch because I don’t want to go out in the rain,” when in fact it’s sunny outside and the person who just walked in was soaked because the lawn sprinklers unexpectedly came on.

Oshry’s insight helps me to check myself when I find myself making assumptions about others. When I notice I am making a negative assumption, I remind myself that I’m just making stuff up to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, and I ask myself whether I can come up with a plausible positive story instead. If I can, then I have no basis on which to judge the person on the negative version I made up, and I can almost always come up with a positive explanation. Of course, the best thing to do is to ask questions to fill in the gaps in our knowledge with actual information, but in the absence of facts, it’s helpful to avoid falling into the trap of believing in a negative self-created fiction.

I have found that the more I follow the lessons I learned from Rogers and Oshry on these matters, the more I genuinely like people, and the more I enjoy making room for them to be.

The other reason I’m good at making room for people to be is I naturally have a tendency to live in the present. I don’t tend to spend much time dwelling on the past, or planning for the future. Unchecked, this can cause issues, because I can find myself in the car on my way to a meeting, and suddenly think, “I wish I had brought such-and-such with me!” On the other hand, it’s great for having conversations with people, because I naturally focus on what they are saying in the moment, without my attention being distracted with thoughts about the past or future.

What I have been finding lately, however, is now that I’m a synagogue president, I’m spending a lot more of my time making room for other people to be. I genuinely want to hear the opinions of all interested parties regarding what the Board is and should be doing, and why. I genuinely want to hear from congregants, staff, and clergy about what we are doing well and what we can do to improve. I genuinely want to work with our campus partners and others on issues of mutual interest.

And I am becoming increasingly aware that, although I love to make space for others to be and I believe I am good at doing it, I cannot do it too much for too long without risking harm to myself. God, it is said, had to restrict God’s self in order to make space in which to create the world. Similarly, I must restrict my presence in the world in order to make space in which others can comfortably be.

Now, I am in the process of learning how to ensure I take sufficient time and effort to create enough space in which I can be my full self, so I don’t become overwhelmed by the restrictions I place on myself when I make room for others. It requires me to be more mindful of my own needs and to make sure I create enough experiences on a regular basis to express myself and to recharge my batteries. And it means I need to make some hard choices about when I want to make room for others, and when I feel I need to just be me and trust those around me to make the space they need for themselves.

Wish me luck.

—————-
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