White Space

Hello friend — it’s Miriam 👋🏻
Welcome to this week’s Ikigami Insider.

Last week we explored distraction.
Not as failure, but as design.
Not as weakness, but as a signal.

This week, we go one step deeper:
What if the real revolution isn’t focus — but space?
The space to choose what actually matters.
To listen. To build. To become.

Intuition: When a System Becomes Too Small

Ikigami started as an impulse — to move, to share, to test.
For six months, this space has held thoughts in rhythm.
And it worked.

Until it didn’t.

Because here’s the truth:
I’m not a creator in the conventional sense.
I’m a publisher of layered process.
A thinker who writes systems — not sequences.

And Ikigai?
It’s not content.
It’s context.
That changes everything.

Hack for Intuition: Make a Map of Silence
Before you schedule anything this week, draw your map of no.
Mark one place, one time, one ritual where no content is consumed.
Call it White Space — even if it’s only 10 minutes.

Stillness isn’t the opposite of productivity.
It’s the soil where meaning grows.

Intelligence: White Space as Structure

So I’ve begun to build something new.

A slower system.
A deeper home.
One that reflects what I now know through research, reflection, and radical intuition.

White Space is not the absence of doing.
It’s the architecture of being.

In the coming days, you’ll sense the shift.
Daily thoughts will breathe outside your inbox.
Weekly essays will gain more density.
And the question isn’t: will you follow?
It’s: where does your own Ikigai want to go next?

Hack for Intelligence: Edit Your Inputs
Audit what enters your mind.
Just for one day.

Ask:

• What am I listening to out of habit?

• What am I reading out of fear?

• What am I watching because I forgot how to pause?

Delete one thing.
Replace it with a window, a walk, or a page you’ve been too deep for lately.

Integrity: The Art of Moving Without Noise

This is not an exit.
It’s a refinement.

Nothing is being taken away.
But something new is being born.

If you've found value here, you’ll know if it’s meant to continue.
And you’ll feel it — not through a CTA, but through a quiet yes.

You’ll hear from me again soon.
But not from this exact address.
The Insider is moving systems — and next week, you’ll glimpse where.

Hack for Integrity: Build One Space That Reflects You
Choose one area of your life that feels like noise.
Your calendar.
Your inbox.
Your notes app.
Now: redesign it.

Not for efficiency.
But for alignment.
Make it quieter. Simpler.
Let it become a mirror for who you are becoming.

A Reflection in Verse

The deepest systems
are not made of code,
but of silence,
choice,
and the soft fire of knowing.

Build from there.

Thumbnail Photo of Filip Kominik on Unsplash

3 Recommended Readings

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell – On reclaiming attention as a political and creative act

The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi – Japanese philosophy meets radical self-direction

The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul – How space, body and environment shape how we think

A Question for You
What is the smallest, bravest space you could protect this week?
And what would happen if you let your purpose rest there — without force?

As always — reply if this stirred something.
With clarity, and with space,
Miriam

P.S.
This is the 44th post in this series — including the email sequence from my Master’s thesis. And on my 44th birthday, I found myself in Room 44, standing before Caspar David Friedrich.

Some things are coincidence.
Others are composition.
This feels like both.

Let’s see what unfolds from here.