The Love Space Demands

The Love That Space Demands

Week Three — I Can See In Color: Women on the Threshold

M. Hakikah Shamsideen

I am in a clearing.

I have come out of the forest — years of it, decades of it — and I am standing in a wide open field. North, South, East, West. All directions available. All of them waiting for me to make a move.

Right now, I am just here.

It almost feels lonely. Except that I know God is in this space too.

If the first weeks were black, white and blue — void, reckoning, depth — this week is green. The green of a clearing. Of living things. Of what grows when you finally give it room.

I have experienced clearings before — smaller ones, briefer ones; clearings I rushed through because I didn’t know how to just be still. But this one, in my sixth decade, feels different.

More intentional. More thoughtful. Like I arrived here on purpose, even if I didn’t plan it.

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This inner calmness is something I am not used to.

Outwardly, I appear peaceful, composed, and move slowly. Yet internally, I frequently feel frantic, restless, wild.

I realize now that I stayed busy for a reason, always on the move. Constantly planning, acting, or striving to achieve something.

The busyness wasn’t just habit — it was armor.

If I was moving, I didn’t have to feel the weight of the quiet. I didn’t have to sit with the questions that only surface when everything else goes still.

That worked, barely, for the first five decades. But this sixth decade demands attention. It asks you to allow yourself to exhale.

I am learning slowly, imperfectly, and with some resistance, to be okay with not always knowing how I feel. To let the in-between be what it is without rushing it toward resolution. To stop treating the space between chapters as a problem to solve.

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Here is what I know about this season that I didn’t know before:

It reminds me of the summer before I started college.

I was seventeen. The world was stretched out before me — spacious, unhurried, full of everything I hadn’t chosen yet. What I should major in was my biggest dilemma. But underneath that practical question was something larger, something I couldn’t name at seventeen but can name now:

All things are possible.

That feeling has come back. At my age, we’ve been taught the contrary — that time is slipping away., that it's running out. I’ve lived long enough to understand what I’m letting go of and wise enough to see what I’m moving toward. The difference between being seventeen and now is that this time, I’m making a conscious choice.

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My mother was a meticulous planner.

Super organized. Rarely still. Even her resting was purposeful. She didn’t tell me to keep moving, she didn’t have to. Her life did. I absorbed the message the way children do: not from words, but from watching.

I understood it better when I was older and understood more about her childhood. For her, not having a plan wasn’t an inconvenience. It meant poverty. It meant illness, even death. It meant the kind of precarity that leaves marks on a family for generations.

Consequently, she devised plans for nearly every aspect of her life. Inspired by her, I was always strategizing and organizing, even if I didn’t always implement those plans. For years, not knowing the next steps seemed like failure to me — as if something was wrong, as if I had fallen behind.

It wasn’t until she was older and retired, and I was an adult, that she told me something I have never forgotten:

“Don’t be like me. You rest.”

I am trying, Mother. I am learning.

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The liminal space — the space between where you are and where you are going — is not empty.

I understand it may seem that way, hollow, formless. It’s akin to being in a room where all the furniture has been removed, but the new items haven’t arrived. However, that’s not the reality. Once I get beyond the anxiety of the silence and spaciousness, I remind myself that God is present — and I start to notice what’s waiting.

Remember that seventeen-year-old standing on the edge of everything? She is still in here. And what she stored — what she held onto through all the decades of doing and giving and becoming — is exactly what this space is now returning to you.

Possibility. An overwhelming, sometimes dizzying amount of it.

I call it “being on the river.”

The Lord is my shepherd; I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside quiet waters. He refreshes my soul. — Psalm 23:1–3

My river theory is this: everything you need is already on the river. You stand on the bank, and things float by — a relationship, an opportunity, a new version of yourself you haven’t met yet. You can reach in and take it. You can let it pass. Sometimes it drifts to the shore on its own.

The river keeps moving. What you decide to keep or let drift is your decision. And whatever you decide, it’s the right one for that time.

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What would it mean to actually live inside this season instead of rushing through it?

It means you get to determine your next step. Not because it was decided for you. Not because it was the only thing left to do. But because you considered it. You thought it through. You chose it.

That is agency. And for many of us, this may be the first time we have had it fully, completely, for ourselves.

When I envision this season, I see myself in a hammock. Or remember Juanita, the mother in the film "Baby Boy contentedly sitting in the garden she created, sipping her wine? That's what I'm talking about.

No one waiting for me. No one needing anything from me.

Time — unhurried, unscheduled, mine — on my hands.

Let that image settle. Let yourself want it. Allow yourself to be. Space demands love of self. A willingness to trust that either direction is the right way for you.

And when you are ready to move — and you will be ready, in your own time — allow yourself this grace:

Your first move forward does not have to be the definitive move for the rest of your life. Neither does your second step. Or your fifth. What matters is not perfection. What matters is movement. And movement is life.

The space is waiting for you. Enter it.

Green is the color of possibility. Of new growth in open space. Of a woman who has come out of the forest and is learning — finally — to let herself stand in the light.

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What would it feel like to stop treating where you are as somewhere to leave — and start treating it as somewhere to be?

The answers you seek are within you. May you have the courage to rest inside them.