Lying Down in the Ever-Falling Snow: Canadian Health Professionals’ Experience of Compassion Fatigue

Lost and Alone in a Prairie Blizzard: The Experience of Space in Compassion Fatigue

LOST AND ALONE IN A PRAIRIE BLIZZARD: The Experience of Space in Compassion Fatigue For winter is a place as much as a time. Adam Gopnik, Winter: Five Windows on the Season Understanding Space as Lived Our world is comprised of multiple, different spaces. These spaces exist around us, found in our physical environment through our engagement with it, formed through our thoughts and memories. Imagine the experience of receiving a postcard from a friend on vacation. Having picked up our mail, we enter our house. Flipping through the flyers and bills, our eyes pause on the photograph of a scenic beach with warm sand and cool ocean waters. As we turn the card over, we read our friend Ben’s message, “I’m having a lovely time. It is so restful and relaxing. Yesterday, I went snorkelling and then danced all night.” As we read his message, although we are physically standing in our house, we are also caught in the space created by Ben’s words and the postcard’s image. The pleasant ambience of our living room with its comfortable furniture recedes as we enter the PHOTO BY ERIKA GOBLE 114 Lost and Alone in a Prairie Blizzard: The Experience of Space in Compassion Fatigue postcard itself. It is as if we, too, are on the beach, sitting beside Ben, listening to his chatter. Or, if his words trigger the memory of our own tropical vacation, we may find ourselves lost in thought. These lived spaces cannot be fully understood in terms of objective, measurable space. Otto Friedrich Bollnow explains, “we live our everyday life in [lived space], but do not reflect on it.”1 Rather, we “exist in existential insideness.”2 Existential insideness , according to environmental phenomenologist David Seamon, is when we experience our physical environment as something we move through unthinkingly.3 It forms the unseen medium through which we can act and only occasionally does it come to our attention. Do we notice our path to the grocery store unless something has changed since the last time we took it? Likewise, when driving along a familiar route we may get lost in a daydream —until the honk of the car behind us calls us back to the driver’s seat. Like few other things, the very concept of space is essential for human existence. According to Immanuel Kant, “space is one of the necessary and fundamental formal conditions for human recognition.”4 Without space, we simply cannot experience the world nor conceive of ourselves as in the world. But because space is necessary for us to be aware of our own existence, we often imagine it as fixed. In school, we are taught the physical properties of our world, and yet this is not how we experience it. We do not notice the constant presence of gravity but accept it unthinkingly. If it does bring itself to our attention, it may be when we find the pull of our body to the earth to be grounding or when we say, “I am so tired, I can barely lift my feet.” We do not and cannot experience our world objectively. Rather, how our world appears to us and how we encounter it is shaped by various things. Consider driving along a Canadian prairie highway on a clear day. Surrounded by wide open space and a blue sky above, we feel a small part of an amazingly large world. Getting out of our car, we have a sense of transparency and openness, as if the prairies are offering themselves up to us to walk upon, to contemplate our existence, and to not be crowded by the things of the urban world. But driving down a prairie road in a blizzard is an altogether different experience. Shrouded in blowing snow, only a few feet around us are visible. Tucked within the warmth of our car, we may feel safe. But should we be outside or should the blizzard worsen, we may begin to get anxious, worried, even claustrophobic. Driving becomes dangerous as the engulfing snow puts us in danger of sliding into unseen cars around us or off the road entirely. We slow our vehicles, blindly inching Lost and Alone in a Prairie Blizzard: The Experience of Space in Compassion Fatigue 115 along the highway, ever vigilant of what might suddenly appear. Walking is even more dangerous because our sense of direction is easily deceived...