Spent a lot of time this past week driving around Los Angeles. Listened to two audio books – Walter Isaacson’s biography “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” and Alan Lightman’s “Einstein’s Dreams,” a poetic rumination on the dreams Einstein might have had while experiencing the burst of genius which led to his Theory of Relativity.

It was a week that felt like too much to do, not enough time to do it. Not.Enough.Time… ? That’s when a new insight hit. It’s not that I don’t have enough time. I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH SPACE!

Space is more generous than time. Time is unrelenting. It marches forward. I have no control over time. But space is available. I can pay attention at any instant, be in the space that I’m in and honor it. Supported by the space inside me and the space around me, trusting in the space to reward me for my attention, I can open up to my own intuition. Confident that when I return to it, time will have moved forward and I will be more “here” than I was before, when I thought that I was a victim of time, rather than a participant in space.

In comedy, they say “timing is everything.” But comedy timing is as much about space as it is about time. An improviser, in order to find the right “timing,” is really being informed by the interplay in the space between her and the other players and between performer and audience. In that space is the intuition regarding how to “time something.” By “playing” the space, the great comic actor gets his “timing.”