The Space We Create: Michael Macy's Episode

By Sandy Glanfield

Michael Macy is a good storyteller. His life experience makes for great material.

As Michael described what happened for people in conflict zones when peace arrived, something happened in the telling too. Each time he got to the moment of acknowledging the space that was created, he paused.

It wasn't a pause for words. It was something else. An acknowledgement, almost visceral, of what it means for human beings when conflict lifts and something different becomes possible. The ability to think differently, to move differently, to change. I could feel it in the energy of how he spoke. A moment of quiet. Of recognition. Of the real, bodily sense of something shifting.

It stayed with me long after we stopped recording.

It made me think about arguments. The ones we have at home, in the middle of the night, with the people we love most. We have a saying here, don't we, "never go to bed on an argument." I've followed that advice. And honestly? Some of the things said in those hours of exhausted, righteous perseverance are things I wish I could take back.

I've since learned that in other cultures, wisdom runs the other way. Sleep on it. Rest. Come back to it. And really, doesn't that make more sense?

Because something happens when we step away. We move, slowly, from fury to something softer. We wake in the night from a restless sleep thinking, what did I say? We see the person we argued with in the morning light and feel sadness rather than anger. And something opens.

A chink.

A possibility.

The faint but real sense that maybe, just maybe, we weren't entirely right.

That is the space Michael talks about. Not the absence of the argument, but the peace that creates the room for something different to come in.

It seems like a small, everyday thing compared to the conflict zones Michael has worked in. But I wonder if it isn't the same energy, playing out on a smaller stage. That daily insistence on being right, on fixing what's wrong, right now, without pause, without breath. What if sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is take a beat? Allow the shift. Allow the possibility.

Michael mentioned, almost in passing, that as he gets older he is learning to listen more than he speaks. I've been thinking about that ever since. Because maybe that too is a form of peace. The space we create when we stop filling every moment with our own certainty. The listening that allows someone else, or even ourselves, to find our way to something new.

And perhaps that is where the golden rule lives. As we would hope for, we grant others the space, the patience, and the grace of not always needing to be right, right now. It asks something of us. But it also offers something: the possibility that when we create peace, even in small moments, even in the quiet after an argument, we make room for something better to come in.

What would it look like to bring a little of that into each day? To offer the people around us, and ourselves, the peace to think, to feel, to change?

It might just start with saying “this is important, let’s talk about it tomorrow after we’ve had some sleep.”