Stepping into Third Space: How creativity helps us reclaim movement and meaning
When I was two years old, I was sitting on a carriage swing with my older sister. She sat on one side, and I sat facing her on the other. The neighborhood kids thought it was fun to push us too hard, and I wanted them to stop. I put my foot down—literally—and my leg snapped in two above the ankle. Having just learned to walk, I found myself back to crawling, my tiny leg encased in a plaster cast.
Fast forward to age twenty-six, and I lost my ability to walk again. This time, it was a high-speed, head-on collision on the highway. I was wearing a seatbelt, but the impact was devastating. My spinal cord was displaced by 40 degrees, T-12 was broken, and my body was paralyzed from the waist down. At the Mayo Clinic, where I was flown by air ambulance, doctors gave me less than a 5 percent chance of walking again. What followed was a painstaking journey of rehabilitation and relearning—a slow reclamation of movement.
Not surprisingly, these two events left me with an understandable fear of “stepping out.” Having spent too much time in body casts and wheelchairs, I am in no hurry to take physical risks. And yet, I have always been a risk-taker at heart, driven by a deep desire to explore, to discover, and to create.
Perhaps that’s why creativity has always been so important to me. It offers a “world” to explore that doesn’t require risking bodily harm. The world I found is one that the ancient Sufis called the imaginal world. I call it third space—a place of infinite possibility, creative discovery, and deep knowing. It’s a world I’ve spent my life exploring, one step at a time.
