Geez, You're Mental (Spaces in Print and Spaces in Thought)

Geez, You’re Mental (Spaces on the Page and Spaces in Thought)

In his column this week, Slate magazine writer Farhad Manjoo lays into people who commit what he considers a terrible offense: using two spaces after a period. I guess I’m a terrible person, then, because if it weren’t for the automatic space-erasers on these sites, there would never be less than two spaces at the end of my written sentences.

(View the column by clicking here.)

Manjoo provides ample arguments to back him up: typographers have agreed since the early 1900s that one space is correct and two spaces is “criminal”; people who use two spaces only do so because of the way typewriters worked 60 years ago; having one space instead of two is “more visually pleasing.”

Although at first I expected a perfectionistic rant (I’m a recovering grammar geek, and even I thought writing an entire article about spaces was going a bit overboard), it turned out to be a solid piece with some interesting historical bits for me to learn.

The best lesson we can learn from this article, however, has nothing to do with grammatical or typographical spaces, but rather about the space between our thoughts, or the lack thereof. About how ridiculously mental -- that is to say, how concept-obsessed, how mind-based -- we’ve all become.

Where once we lived in nature, worked in the fields, tended gardens, crafted things with our hands, now we make our livings talking and pontificating, consigning the real labors to the machines.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have intellectual discussions, and I don’t feel there’s anything wrong with working with ideas versus concrete objects (the separation is just in our minds, anyway). But we’re focusing on a single word while forgetting to read the poem!

The result, unfortunately, is that we’re completely caught up in our thinking minds instead of living in the real world. We no longer know how to just be present to what we’re doing; there’s always a line of commentary, most often coming from within our own heads.

So even as we’re exposed to more incredible opportunities than could fit into ten lifetimes, we’re seeing record rates of depression, social isolation, anxiety, and suicides. Even conditions alleged to be entirely physical (I don’t believe anything is ever so separate) can be linked to the manic brain.

The secret is not to do more, or think differently, or be somebody else. The secret is to let the mind be still and to be present to what we’re doing, whether that’s working in a garden or punching a keyboard, trying to decide how many spaces to use. The impact is profound.