Kamisaka Sekka
All Kinds of Things
Color woodblock printed book
Publisher: Unsōdōexpand_less
(Vol. 3, April 1903)

"…I will need to make some space for a miracle to occur."

Aging must be the process by which I successively outgrow stuff. Yesterday, I finally culled three pairs of jeans I once believed that I might one day fit into again. Yesterday, inexplicably, I finally acceded to the should-have-been-easier truth that I wouldn’t be fitting into them again. I set them aside. Suddenly, my pants drawer had more than enough space for my remaining wardrobe. The Muse mentioned that she probably had a few things to add to my collection destined for the Goodwill, and all was just a little better with our world, or at least, finally threatened to be better. I had retained some prior Prosperity which had been steadfastly preventing fresh Prosperities from entering. Even if I wasn’t itching to acquire any Prosperity, those remnants had rendered my present more cluttered than Prosperous feeling. I had probably been demonstrating some principle to myself then.

Often, I finally figure out something I had been trying for ages to get myself to understand. Come the moment, come the teacher, but, often, moments pass without the student recognizing their teacher’s presence. I could be famous for not noticing that I was teaching precisely the lesson I needed to learn. I have always been my most effective source of obliviousness. Whatever stands between me and such lessons learned might have learned its meta lesson by now, after so many effective deflections, but it hasn’t. It probably won’t, either. Realizations come with the familiar shocking suddenness after hanging around unrecognized for ages. I have been the medium delivering such lessons since my earliest remembrances, yet I still seem to need to first fool myself into blindness and deflection.

My lesson for today, and, I suppose, for every day heading forward, might be that I need to remember to make space for some fresh Prosperities in whatever space my Prosperity presently resides. Either I am continually outgrowing and discarding accustomed Prosperities or I am actively chasing fresh ones away. Admittedly, the replacements might not seem adequate on initial inspection. Like any New! and Improved! anything, a replacement Prosperity won’t seem as familiar as any old regular. It might fit better, though. It might offer an opportunity to abandon some old insanity and take on the world on fresher terms, as it might actually be now, rather than how it used to be but is no longer. I suspect that many of my treasures exist as markers of my past, monuments to who or what I used to be but am no longer, and never will again be. Such monuments make terrible pets, and encourage a kind of unconsciousness that rarely helps anyone better cope with their present, let alone future, circumstances.

Aging doesn’t only involve loss, but it unavoidably includes it. Those losses need not all come as the result of a burglary, stolen without permission in the stillness of some night. Some can come from voluntary separation, a suddenly firm conviction that what was once a necessary component of Prosperity isn’t necessarily one any longer, and the concomitant conviction that fresh Prosperities tend to flood into fresh spaces provided. The space necessarily comes first, and creating such space must be a faith-based initiative, one not necessarily guaranteed to manifest any better than the discarded old familiar. MakingSpace produces no better than possibilities, but such potential seems essential for fresh Prosperities to arrive.

Where will these fresh Prosperities appear? Must the answer to this question matter? If one knew beforehand, where would the surprise hide? Where would the shocking recognition of discovery emerge? Casting bread upon any water seems at first to only serve as a waste of otherwise good bread. Later, when the fish rise to the unanticipated bait, some wisdom appears alongside. I acknowledge that I must be my own teacher of most of these lessons. I, however unlikely this might seem, must be the author of my own discoveries, and I might acknowledge that I have been a whole lot wiser than I usually suspected when MakingSpace in my past. It might be that Prosperity despises voids, and quickly recognizes space once it’s been made. It might also be that it also despises crowds, and avoids space that’s already occupied by Prosperities, however ancient, ill-fitting, ragged, or beloved. I guess, if I want something like Prosperity to happen, I will need to make some space for a miracle to occur.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz