Clearing Is the Easy Part

I cleared off a shelf recently. It’s a task I’d avoided for a while.

There was nothing unusual about the shelf or what was on it. A collection of books I no longer read, papers I'd kept without a clear reason. Things had accumulated slowly enough that I’d stopped noticing them. Lots of dust.

When everything was cleared away, the change wasn’t dramatic. The shelf looked more or less the same, just less crowded and much less dusty. And yet, there was a shift in how it felt. There was less visual weight; it was less of a distraction.

I stood there for a moment, taking it in.

And then the next thought arrived almost immediately.

What should go there now?

And I paused.

I've come to recognise these moments, though it takes practice. The impulse to immediately fill what’s just been cleared is easy to overlook, easy to move past without ever examining it. I noticed I was already wondering how long the empty shelf would stay that way.

I was working from an assumption that cleared space doesn't get to just be empty, that it needs to become something better, more useful.

In practice, the act of clearing rarely stands on its own. It's quickly followed by replacement, as though clearing were only ever the first step to something as yet unidentified. And that was where I paused, standing at the edge of … something.

Letting things go turns out to be the straightforward part. What comes next is the more revealing part. 

Why Space Is Hard to Tolerate

The end of a relationship, the loss of work, even the turning of a season can leave behind a similar kind of space. What held things in place is gone. What comes next is not yet here.

Liminal comes from the Latin for threshold. It describes the experience of having left one place without yet reaching another, like the space between the end of winter and whatever spring becomes. It names a kind of transition that is difficult to describe directly, where there is no clear sense of what comes next. It takes shape in relation to what surrounds it, defined by what was and what hasn’t yet arrived.

Seen this way, spring cleaning is less a practical task than a kind of threshold ritual. Things are cleared out because they have accumulated.

Which is why that in-between can feel uncomfortable. Our minds are drawn towards predictability, and uncertainty is registered as something to be resolved. The unfamiliar becomes a problem before any conscious decision is made.

What fills the space is usually whatever is most immediately available, rather than anything considered. Habit returns, the familiar reasserts itself, and the discomfort is resolved before the opening has a chance to become anything more than a brief interruption.

The difficulty is that the moment that calls for a pause is often the one where pausing feels least tolerable. The urge to fill the space is understandable, even inevitable, but it can happen before our awareness has time to catch up.

The Question Underneath the Question

Spring cleaning is preparation. Things are cleared out so that the new season has room to arrive. The clearing itself isn’t the point, or not for long.

When a shelf is cleared, the question of what should go there arrives almost automatically. When a role or commitment is cancelled or finished, we turn to what comes next. In both cases the gap registers less as a pause than as something unresolved.

Part of what makes that pause uncomfortable is that the doing was never just doing. It’s also a way of knowing who we are. When it stops, even briefly, that certainty stops with it.

That in-between state creates a pull toward whatever comes next. Spring cleaning leans into that pull. There's always a next step available, a better version of the shelf, the schedule, the routine. Uncomfortable as it is, that in-between space also offers something. Staying with it briefly opens the possibility of meeting what comes next with some awareness, rather than reacting to fill the void. The thing is, we rarely stay with it long enough to find out.

The Habit of Filling Without Question

Our natural inclination is toward homeostasis, the tendency to restore balance and familiarity as quickly as possible. A cleared schedule fills again, a dropped routine gets replaced, we reach for the nearest distraction in a moment of stillness, often a phone.

We slide back into comfortable patterns before we've examined them, unaware that we have the option to pause, to be present within the moment before deciding what comes next. Ruts form in precisely the space where a decision could have been made but wasn't.

It’s worth saying that none of this is a failing. Defaulting to the familiar takes less energy than pausing to examine what's happening. The brain is designed to conserve resources, and returning to what is known is the path of least resistance. Noticing the habit is where something becomes possible, a moment of self-awareness in the space between one thing and the next.

What Space Actually Does

Staying with empty space is uncomfortable, and for good reason.

Our brains are wired to predict what comes next, drawing on familiar patterns and routines to maintain a sense of safety and coherence. When those patterns are temporarily removed, the brain has less to draw on, and that absence can register as unease or low-level threat before we've had a chance to assess what's happening.

We can experience the unfamiliar as a problem before we know whether it is one, mobilising all the anxiety and defensiveness that uncertainty can activate, even when nothing warrants it.

That discomfort isn't a signal that something is necessarily wrong. It's what unfamiliarity feels like. The unease of not yet knowing what comes next is less a problem to be solved than an experience to be noticed, and there's a difference between the two that becomes clearer with practice.

Between client sessions I have a brief window, ten minutes at most. That window could easily be absorbed by writing notes, emails, or the general administration of my day. Instead, I've developed a ritual around it. I make a cup of tea and carry it back to my office. One or two cats usually appear and settle nearby. I return to my chair with enough time to settle, rather than arriving still mid-motion. That brief threshold between one session and the next is where I clear my head and arrive renewed.

The ritual doesn’t need to be elaborate to be effective. With practice, we develop trust in our own capacity to tolerate uncertainty, drawing less on external structure for a sense of stability and more on our own inner resources.

Not Everything Needs to Return

The space fills before we notice. We put things back without stopping to think about what we're doing.

Staying with space and avoiding what needs attention can look similar from the outside, but they feel different from the inside. Avoidance is slippery. The closer we move toward what needs attention, the more strongly it pushes back.

Staying with space means accepting the resistance rather than being pushed back by it, holding our ground within the discomfort rather than away from it. For most of us that discomfort is manageable, if not exactly welcome. For some of us it runs deeper than ordinary unease, and working through it may need more support than reflection alone can provide.

What the space between clearing and what comes next offers is a moment of authorship. Not every commitment, habit, or demand on attention needs to return just because it was there before. These are choices, and the space is where they become visible as choices rather than inevitabilities.

A core sense of who we are remains intact through all of it, through the clearing, the discomfort, the uncertainty of not yet knowing what comes next. It doesn't need to be restored because it was never lost. It’s the part that chooses what returns. Being present within that space is what makes the choosing possible.

Before You Decide What Comes Next

The shelf got cleared. The books that no longer belonged were gone. The dust was dealt with.

And then the space sat there, before I moved to fill it.

In that pause, I caught myself mid-reach. The space was empty, and I was already planning what would fill it, before I stopped to consider whether it was what I wanted there.

What returns automatically and what returns by choice can look identical from the outside. From the inside, over time, they feel very different.

The shelf will fill again. The difference between what we put back by habit and what we put back by choice matters. Those two things are not always the same.

What you find in that space was always yours, even if it had never been claimed. You just needed the fear and uncertainty to settle enough to notice it.

This article comes from a humanistic, person-centred psychotherapy practice. Sometimes the in-between space arrives unexpectedly, through loss, endings, or change we didn't choose. Working through what it leaves behind may take more than reflection alone.

If something here resonated, or if you are navigating a transition of your own, reaching out for psychotherapy support can make a difference.

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