The Space Between

Maybe Meaning Was Never Inside You: The Transjective Nature of Being Human

“The space between where you smile and hide
Is where you'll find me if I get to go.”

Dave Matthews

Remember Dave Matthews? I borrowed the title of this article from him.

I have been a fan of Dave Matthews for years, and “The Space Between” is one of those songs whose title has stayed with me beyond the song itself. I am not suggesting Matthews was making the philosophical argument I am about to make. Songs do not have to become theories to matter. But there is something about those three words that has always felt larger to me than the distance separating one thing from another.

We tend to imagine the space between as empty. There is me, and there is you. There is the person, and there is the world. There is the observer, and there is what is being observed. Reality seems to consist of separate things, with space marking the distance between them.

But some of the most important realities of our lives exist precisely there.

Love does not belong entirely to either person who loves. A conversation is not contained in either person speaking. Belonging does not exist solely in the individual or the community. Music is not simply sound traveling through air, nor is its meaning merely something manufactured inside the listener. Something comes into existence through the encounter that neither side possesses alone.

Maybe the space between is not empty at all.

Maybe it is one of the most crowded places in human existence.

This Space Has a Name

There are things in this life that seem to exist neither entirely inside us nor entirely outside us. A forest is made of trees, soil, water, fungi, insects, stone, and light. We can study its biodiversity, analyze the chemistry of its soil, measure rainfall, identify species, and explain the elaborate exchanges taking place beneath the ground. The forest exists whether we are there to experience it or not.

But the forest you enter after the death of someone you love is not merely an arrangement of biological matter. You walk beneath the trees carrying something the forest cannot know. Nothing about your loss has changed the composition of the soil, altered the course of the stream, or interrupted the birds calling to one another above you. Still, the place is different.

The silence reaches you differently now. The distance between the trees seems more spacious, and the wind moving through the canopy touches something that conversation has been unable to reach. You sit beside a stream and discover that your grief somehow has more room there than it did inside the walls of your house. The forest has not changed, and yet the forest you are experiencing is no longer the same.

We usually resolve this contradiction by placing the forest on one side and our experience of it on the other. There is the objective forest, composed of matter and existing independently of us, and there is the subjective forest, shaped by memory, emotion, perception, and interpretation. The distinction is indispensable in many areas of life, but it becomes less satisfying when we try to use it to explain the experiences that matter most deeply to us.

Where, for example, does the meaning of a restaurant you have been returning to for twenty years exist? The room has dimensions, the food has ingredients, and the business has a market value, but none of these can account for the anniversaries celebrated there, the arguments survived, the news received, the people who once sat across from you, or what it feels like to return after one of them is gone. Where does the beauty of a piece of music exist, or the significance of a wedding ring after the person who gave it to you has died? These realities are not properties of objects in the ordinary sense, but calling them merely subjective seems equally inadequate.

Something is happening in the relationship between us and what we encounter. The world contributes something real, but so do our history, attention, embodiment, memory, vulnerability, and participation. Meaning does not seem to reside solely in either place. It arises somewhere in the meeting.

Dave Matthews seems to understand something about this space between. So much of his music lives in the tension between people, between longing and loss, intimacy and distance, what can be said and what remains beyond language.

The space between is not empty distance but a living territory where relationship takes shape, where one life reaches toward another, and where something exists that neither person possesses alone. Maybe that is why the phrase has stayed with me for so long. It names something I have increasingly come to believe is fundamental to being alive: much of what matters most does not reside solely in us or in the world, but emerges in the encounter between them.

This space has a name: the transjective.

The word transjective emerged from attempts in philosophy and psychology to move beyond the rigid division between subjective and objective reality. Although relatively uncommon, it names an old insight found across phenomenology, existentialism, pragmatism, and relational thought: some realities arise neither solely within us nor independently outside us, but through our encounter and participation with the world.

The Israeli-French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and artist Bracha L. Ettinger was developing the language of “transjectivity” within her matrixial theory by the 1990s, as part of an attempt to think beyond a clean separation of subject and object toward processes of encounter, co-emergence, and relationality.

Ettinger wrote:

“Subjectivity here is an encounter between I and uncognized yet intimate non-I neither rejected nor assimilated.”

In other words, the self is not something that exists entirely on its own and then enters into relationship with what is outside it. Who we are emerges, in part, through encounters with what is not us without either side having to absorb or erase the other. The boundary remains, but something new becomes possible in the meeting.

A Reality That Exists Between

The word transjective initially sounds technical, but the experience it describes is among the most ordinary features of being alive. It names realities that cannot be understood adequately by placing them entirely within the perceiving subject or entirely within the external object. They emerge through relationship, through what happens when a particular person encounters a particular dimension of the world from within the circumstances of an actual life.

Imagine returning to the house where you grew up after being away for decades. Another person could walk through those rooms and see an ordinary structure: a kitchen, hallway, bathroom, several bedrooms, aging windows, worn floors. An inspector might notice problems you would miss, while a real estate agent could calculate its value with greater precision than you ever could. Their descriptions would be accurate, but they would not describe the house you entered.

You see the place where your mother stood when she told you something you never forgot. You notice the stair where you sat listening to an argument in another room, or the bedroom window you stared through when you were fifteen and desperate for your real life to begin. Perhaps you enter the kitchen and remember an utterly insignificant morning when someone poured coffee, a radio was playing, and a person now dead walked through the room carrying groceries. Nothing extraordinary happened that morning, which may be precisely why the memory feels so devastating when it returns.

No instrument could locate this additional layer of reality in the house itself. The walls do not contain your childhood, and the floorboards have no memory of the people who once walked across them. New owners could renovate every room without knowing that they were dismantling the physical setting of experiences that remain fundamental to your understanding of who you are.

But saying that all of this exists only inside your head misses something equally important. Those experiences actually happened there. Your body learned those rooms, your nervous system learned their sounds, and particular forms of safety, fear, boredom, longing, conflict, affection, and becoming became associated with that place. The house participated in the formation of a life, even though the house itself possessed no awareness of doing so.

The meaning of the place therefore belongs neither exclusively to the building nor exclusively to the person remembering it. It exists through a history of relationship between them. The house entered your story, and your story became attached to the house, creating a significance that another person cannot simply acquire by walking through the same door.

This is one reason our lives cannot be understood as occurring entirely inside the boundaries of our bodies. We become entangled with places, people, objects, rituals, landscapes, stories, and communities. They enter the organization of memory and identity until it becomes difficult to say precisely where the self ends and the world that formed it begins.

Reality Meets Biography

Every encounter has two histories. There is the history of what we encounter, and there is the history we carry into the encounter. The moment occurs where those histories meet, which is why no two people ever encounter precisely the same world even when they are standing side by side.

A twenty-year-old and an eighty-year-old can stand before the same ocean and see the same water moving toward the same shore beneath the same sky. The younger person may experience possibility, distance, adventure, or a life still largely ahead. The older person may experience time, impermanence, memory, or the strange recognition that the horizon has outlasted almost everyone they once knew. The ocean has not changed between them, but the lives arriving at its edge are radically different.

Someone who nearly drowned will encounter that water differently from someone who grew up beside it. A person grieving a spouse may hear something in the repetition of the waves that another person does not hear at all. Someone standing there with a child may experience tenderness, while another person may feel loneliness so strongly that the vastness of the sea seems almost unbearable.

None of this makes the ocean a projection of the mind. Its scale, sound, movement, depth, coldness, force, and horizon are real features of the world acting upon the people who stand before it. But those features enter lives already shaped by memory, expectation, fear, love, loss, and time, and the resulting experience cannot be reduced to either side alone.

Reality meets biography. The world encounters a life that has already been underway, and the life encounters something it did not create. What happens between them carries the marks of both.

This is where the idea of the transjective becomes more than a philosophical curiosity. It challenges the picture of the human being as a sealed consciousness looking outward upon a world of external objects. We are not merely observers receiving information from reality. We are embodied participants whose lives are continually being altered through what we meet.

The transjective also changes how we think about the structure of reality itself. We tend to imagine reality as a collection of separate things that exist first and then enter into relationships with one another. Relationship is not secondary to reality; it is one of the ways reality is constituted. A person, a forest, a memory, or a piece of music may exist independently in important respects, but other realities become possible only through their encounter.

Love requires more than one life. Belonging requires participation. Meaning requires some meeting between a consciousness and a world it did not create. If this is true, then reality consists not only of things, but also of relationships, encounters, and emergent possibilities that exist between them. The space between is not simply where reality happens. It may be part of what reality is.

A Private Geography

Most of us carry a private geography made up of places that have become inseparable from who we are. There is the street where we fell in love, the hospital corridor where we waited for news, the restaurant where someone always sat in the same chair, the trail we walked when our life no longer made sense, or the airport where we watched someone disappear through security and knew that something had ended.

Years later, we can return and feel time gather around us. The place may have changed completely. Someone painted the house, the restaurant has another name, a parking lot covers the field, and people who know nothing about our history move casually through spaces that once seemed to contain the entire universe. Still, something in us recognizes where we are.

Our lives become geographically distributed in this way. Pieces of our histories attach themselves to rooms, landscapes, objects, sounds, seasons, smells, and particular qualities of light. We may not think about those connections for years until some unexpected encounter brings them back into consciousness with a force that surprises us.

A scent crosses a room and we are ten years old again, not metaphorically but bodily, as though time has folded around the smell. A certain warmth in the afternoon air returns us to a summer we had stopped remembering. We drive a road we have not traveled in decades and find an earlier version of ourselves riding invisibly beside us, complete with ambitions, fears, and assumptions we no longer possess.

Memory, then, is not simply an archive stored somewhere inside the brain. Memory is continually called forth through relationship with a world that contains the conditions of its return. The world does not remember us in the way another consciousness remembers, but places and objects participate in the retrieval of who we have been.

This helps explain why the loss of a place can feel like more than the loss of property. When a childhood home is demolished, a forest is destroyed, or a neighborhood becomes unrecognizable, something can feel severed that no photograph fully restores. We have lost not merely an external location but part of the relational architecture through which our own history remained accessible.

The Weight of Things

Grief reveals this relational character of reality with unusual clarity. After someone dies, the most ordinary objects can suddenly become difficult to touch. A shirt hanging in a closet, a coffee cup beside the sink, a pair of shoes near the door, or a few words written on an envelope can acquire an emotional density they did not appear to possess a week earlier.

Materially, nothing about these objects has changed. Cotton remains cotton, ceramic remains ceramic, ink remains pigment dried on paper. A stranger entering the house might regard them as possessions to be sorted, donated, stored, or discarded. The bereaved person encounters something entirely different.

The coffee cup is no longer simply a cup because it belonged to a pattern of life that no longer exists. Someone held it every morning. It sat beside particular conversations, silences, irritations, routines, and ordinary beginnings to ordinary days. Its significance accumulated so quietly through repetition that no one noticed it accumulating until the person was gone.

This is one of grief’s most disorienting features. It changes the world without changing the objects in it. The chair remains in exactly the same place, but the room is different because no one will sit there in the old way again. The house keeps its dimensions while becoming a place the surviving person has never inhabited before.

Loss exposes how relational our world had been all along. Meaning had settled into gestures, rooms, habits, objects, and routines without requiring our conscious attention. The death does not create that meaning so much as reveal how much of it was already there.

To describe this meaning as subjective is not exactly wrong, but it is incomplete. The significance did not arise from the mind alone. It grew through years of contact between people, objects, habits, places, and time. Grief makes visible the invisible web of participation through which an ordinary world became our world.

Love Creates a World

Love may be the clearest example of a reality that exists between rather than within. We commonly speak about love as an internal state: I love you, I have feelings for you, my affection belongs to me. There is certainly an interior dimension to love, but anyone who has shared a life with another person knows that love eventually becomes larger than private emotion.

Over time, two people create a world that neither could have created alone. They accumulate stories, rituals, arguments, repairs, jokes, gestures, disappointments, intimacies, places, routines, private meanings, and forms of communication that would be unintelligible to someone outside the relationship. A phrase that means nothing to anyone else can contain twenty years.

The relationship develops a reality of its own without becoming some mysterious third entity floating between the people involved. It exists through their ongoing participation. Both contribute to it, both are formed by it, and neither possesses it entirely.

This is why the death of someone we love involves more than the removal of an individual from our lives. An entire relational world collapses. There are things we can no longer say because there is no longer anyone who would understand what they mean. Certain memories become ours alone because the only other person who carried them is gone.

Grief is partly the experience of becoming the sole custodian of a world that once existed between two people. Others may know the person who died, and they may grieve deeply themselves, but no one has lost precisely what we lost because no one inhabited exactly the same relationship.

The uniqueness of grief follows from the uniqueness of the world created through love. We are not merely missing a person as an object of affection. We are learning how to inhabit reality after one of the relationships through which reality acquired its familiar shape has disappeared.

The World We Notice

The transjective also helps us understand the role of attention. The world contains more than any person can perceive, and much of what becomes real for us depends upon what we have learned how to notice. Attention does not create the world, but it profoundly influences the world that becomes available to our experience.

A botanist walks through a forest and sees relationships that another person may not notice at all. The leaf shape, the condition of the bark, the organisms growing on fallen wood, and subtle changes in the understory reveal processes invisible to an untrained eye. A musician hears structures inside a symphony that another listener cannot yet distinguish, while a carpenter runs a hand across a table and feels decisions in the wood that most of us would pass over without thought.

The reality was there before the expertise, but the ability to encounter it had to be cultivated. Learning changes perception, and changed perception changes the world we experience. We can therefore inhabit a richer reality without the external environment changing in any obvious way.

This is also true emotionally and relationally. Someone who has learned to listen deeply may hear fear beneath anger where another person hears only hostility. Someone who has suffered may recognize pain in another person’s silence that previously would have seemed like indifference. Love can teach us to notice another person with a precision unavailable to casual attention.

Attention is therefore not merely a mental skill. It is one of the primary ways we participate in reality. What we repeatedly attend to becomes increasingly differentiated, significant, and available to us, while what we habitually ignore can disappear from our experiential world even though it remains directly in front of us.

A culture organized around distraction does more than consume our time. It shapes the kind of world we are capable of inhabiting. If attention is continually fragmented, commodified, and redirected toward whatever is most stimulating, then our relationship with reality itself begins to change.

The Sacred After Certainty

This is where the transjective becomes especially significant for spirituality after religion. Institutional religion has often taught us to locate the sacred somewhere beyond the ordinary world. God exists above reality, behind it, or outside it, while certain texts, people, buildings, rituals, and experiences provide privileged access to that other realm.

When those metaphysical systems lose their credibility, people can experience something much larger than the loss of doctrine. The world itself may appear to lose depth. The ocean becomes only water, the forest only biology, awe only neurochemistry, ritual only cultural behavior, prayer only self-talk, and mystical experience only an altered condition of the brain.

The underlying assumption is that if the supernatural explanation disappears, the experience it once explained must somehow be diminished. We seem forced to choose between recovering the old metaphysics or accepting that what once felt sacred was never anything more than a misunderstanding of ordinary psychological processes.

The transjective opens another possibility. We do not have to believe that a supernatural presence inhabits the ocean in order to acknowledge that standing before it can alter our relationship with scale, time, mortality, and ourselves. We do not have to turn awe into theology or mystery into doctrine for the encounter to possess depth.

Scientific explanation does not abolish this depth. Knowing that awe involves particular neurological and physiological processes tells us something important about how embodied creatures experience the world, but it does not exhaust what an encounter means within a life. The neural activity associated with grief does not tell us what it means to lose the person around whom thirty years of our existence had been organized.

Mechanism and meaning are not competitors. We can understand more about how an experience occurs without concluding that this account contains everything worth knowing about the experience. The fact that every meaningful moment happens through a nervous system does not make meaning an illusion. It tells us that meaning is embodied.

Spirituality can therefore be approached without requiring another world behind this one. It can describe the deepening of our participation in reality itself, the cultivation of forms of attention through which places, people, mortality, beauty, belonging, mystery, and our own existence become more fully available to us.

The sacred, from this perspective, is not a supernatural substance hidden inside certain objects. It describes a quality of encounter in which something can no longer be treated as merely useful, consumable, measurable, or interchangeable. A person becomes irreducible to their function, a place becomes worthy of care, a moment demands our full attention, or mortality makes the ordinary fact of being alive suddenly astonishing.

Nothing has to descend from somewhere else for this to happen. Reality itself can become deep enough.

The Making of a Self

The implications reach beyond spirituality because the self itself may be far more transjective than modern individualism encourages us to believe. We often imagine identity as something located deep inside us, a true self waiting to be uncovered once we strip away social pressure, inherited expectations, and identities imposed by others.

There is something important in reclaiming ourselves from forms of authority that have taught us to become strangers to our own perception. But no self develops in isolation. Long before we possess the ability to reflect upon who we are, relationships are already shaping the language through which we will eventually conduct that reflection.

We become through being loved and failing to be loved, through friendship, conflict, culture, language, embodiment, work, loss, place, responsibility, shame, freedom, beauty, and time. Some people call into existence capacities that had never before found expression. Others teach us that certain parts of ourselves are dangerous, unacceptable, or unlikely to be welcomed.

This does not mean the self is nothing more than a product of its environment. Human beings can resist, reinterpret, reject, and transform what has formed them. But even resistance occurs within a history of encounter. Self-authorship is not the creation of a person from nothing; it is the increasingly conscious participation in the forces, relationships, realities, and possibilities through which a life continues to take shape.

The question of who we are therefore cannot be separated completely from the question of what we are in relationship with. The people we spend our lives among, the institutions we inhabit, the technologies we use, the stories we absorb, the places we belong to, and the forms of attention we cultivate are continually participating in our becoming.

This makes the transjective a question of power as well as meaning. Whoever structures the environments through which we encounter reality gains enormous influence over what becomes visible, sayable, desirable, frightening, believable, or imaginable to us.

How Meaning Happens

Western thought often presents meaning as a choice between discovery and creation. Either meaning already exists within the structure of reality and our task is to discover the purpose assigned to us, or the universe contains no inherent meaning and we must manufacture significance for ourselves.

There are important truths in both positions, but lived experience seems more complicated. Much of what becomes meaningful to us is neither discovered like a buried object nor created through an act of sheer will. It develops through relationship.

A garden acquires meaning because we tend it over years. A neighborhood becomes home because a portion of our life has unfolded there. A friendship becomes irreplaceable because time, trust, conflict, vulnerability, memory, and care have accumulated between two people. A practice becomes important because we return to it long enough for it to begin shaping us in return.

Meaning grows slowly in this way. It thickens through participation, attention, repetition, memory, sacrifice, care, vulnerability, and time. This helps explain why we cannot simply command something to become meaningful. We cannot choose an arbitrary object on Monday morning and decide that by Tuesday it will carry the emotional weight of a twenty-year friendship.

Meaning has a history. It develops because something has passed between us and the world.

This offers an alternative to the lonely image of the modern individual standing before an empty universe with the burden of creating meaning from nothing. We are meaning-making creatures, but we do not make meaning alone. We enter relationships with realities we did not invent, and significance arises through the quality and duration of those encounters.

This has important implications for Existential Health. If meaning, identity, belonging, and even our experience of the sacred emerge partly through relationship with the world, then existential health cannot be understood solely as something happening inside an individual. It also concerns the quality of our participation in reality: the people we share our lives with, the places that ground us, the communities that shape us, the forms of attention we cultivate, and the worlds we help create with others.

A person can possess considerable psychological insight and still inhabit relationships and environments that diminish their sense of aliveness. Existential health therefore asks not only what is happening within us, but what is happening between us and the realities through which our lives are taking shape.

The world contributes something, and so do we.

The space between is not merely a philosophical idea to me. I have experienced it countless times while trail running. There have been long runs when the trail stopped feeling like scenery I was moving through and became something I was participating in: the changing terrain beneath my feet, the temperature of the air, the sound of water somewhere below me, fatigue settling into my body, the distance still ahead. The mountain was not simply a backdrop, and whatever was happening in me was not simply an internal state.

Something emerged through the encounter between my body, the landscape, effort, attention, solitude, and time. I have finished runs physically depleted yet somehow more present to my own life. Nothing supernatural happened out there, but neither does it seem adequate to say that it all happened inside my head. The trail and I met each other, and I came back different.

The Space Between Us and the World

I keep returning to the forest because it seems to hold so much of what I have been trying to understand. Someone enters carrying grief, while the trees stand where they have stood for decades. Light moves through the leaves, water follows the contours of the ground, and birds call to one another without knowing anything about the person walking below them.

The forest offers no explanation for the death. It does not reveal a hidden purpose or transform suffering into a lesson. The loss remains a loss, and the trees remain trees. Nothing supernatural has to occur for the encounter to matter.

The person sits beneath the canopy for a long time. Breathing changes, a memory surfaces, tears come, and the noise that has been filling the mind becomes less insistent. For a while, grief has somewhere to exist besides within the confines of the person carrying it.

Was the meaning in the forest, or was it in the grieving person? The question becomes less interesting once we recognize that the experience required both. A particular life met a particular place at a particular moment, and something became possible in the relationship that neither could have produced alone.

Much of what matters most may have this character. Beauty, belonging, memory, grief, love, identity, meaning, and what we have sometimes called the sacred do not need to be located exclusively inside us or somewhere beyond us. They can emerge within the field of relationship through which a life encounters a world.

We are not sealed minds moving among neutral objects, nor are we passive recipients of a reality whose meanings have all been established in advance. We participate in a world that continually acts upon us while being interpreted, inhabited, loved, feared, remembered, resisted, and changed through us.

There is a space between us and the world that is not empty. It is where relationship happens, where significance gathers, where memory attaches itself to place, where love creates worlds that did not previously exist, and where reality acquires the depth that makes a life more than a sequence of events.

Perhaps the invitation is simply to become more attentive to the space between. Between ourselves and the people we love. Between memory and the places that still carry it. Between grief and the objects suddenly weighted with significance. Between our bodies and the landscapes that change something in us. Between who we have been and whatever life is asking us to become.

There may be more happening there than we have learned to notice. Perhaps much of what we have called meaning, belonging, beauty, love, and even the sacred has always been waiting for us in that space, not somewhere above reality and not merely inside our minds, but in the intimate and unrepeatable encounter between a life and what is real.

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