If you want to grow a garden, you have to find a plot of ground to plant your seeds. If you want to see a new movie you have to make room in your schedule to take in the flick. If you want to raise children you have to rearrange your whole life to allow for sufficient attention, interaction, nurturing, educating and comforting of these precious ones. Any new possibility you’d like to enter your life has to have room in your experience to occupy. You can’t put one more cup of water into an already full gallon of liquid.

A wife was complaining about the seeming meaninglessness of love-making with her husband. “What’s the point?” She wondered. Her husband wanted it, and so had she in earlier years, but now the act seemed empty and boringly ritualistic.

“Make space for the mutual tenderness, thoughtfulness and spiritual affection you really want to feel,” I replied. “Rather than getting depressed over what you don’t like, make room for moments of authentic caring and sharing. Put the physical impulse at bay long enough to give true love a chance to surface between the two of you and be felt spiritually rather than jumping into a mechanical act that soon ends and leaves no permanent improvement in your relationship. Make room for “real” love-making.” I added.

“Aw!” Came the response. “That’s what we need,–space for moments of meaningful caring.”

In our busy rush-rush society the most important things in life often get pushed to the side. In an effort to get a job done, we sacrifice patience and courteousness. In attempts to earn more money, we lose family and marriages. To do what we want to do, we disregard what others important to us desire. We often complain we can’t help it. We had no choice, we argue. But we do have a choice, and the moral imperative is to choose the right options.

Our son loves to play video games on his computer. My wife and I learned long ago we had to regulate his time at the PC so other important activities—like homework!!—didn’t get shoved out of his schedule and forgotten. We had to make sure he had space in his mind for the priorities.

Is there something lacking in your life you’d like to see more of? Make space for it. Accept the possibility of the idea, and like a seed germinating into a full-blown plant, it will bloom in your experience.

There is a spiritual space that every progressive idea occupies. Find that space and abide in it.

It’s not extra hours in the day that creates the desired space. It’s waking up to a new and better view and then acting on it that provides the additional room.

Like experiencing true love. Love doesn’t take material space to be had. It’s not a commodity. God is Love, and God is everywhere. But it does take thoughtfulness, affectionate caring, openness and nurturing to feel the blessings of Love. As we commit to expressing these qualities, we enter the spiritual space they occupy, and they in turn find space in our human experience.

This rule applies to every new and better experience we’d like to claim as our own.