Your environment is always shaping your mind.
Your spaces work on you more than you notice.
Rick Rubin calls this the overstory. The unseen force of place. The coffee shop that helps you focus. The room that sparks a breakthrough. The forest path that shifts your mood. Every place carries history, energy, and intention. They join your thinking whether you want them to or not.
Rubin also keeps an empty chair in his studio. It is not for a person. It is for the presence that has not arrived yet. A reminder to stay receptive. To make space for what is unspoken, for what is waiting to emerge.
Together these two practices point in one direction:
Pay attention to what you can’t see.
Practical ways to apply this:
Audit your spaces. Which ones give you energy, which ones drain you. Move toward the first, minimize the second.
Set an empty chair in your next meeting or work session. Use it as a signal: pause, listen, let the unseen perspective enter.
Before deciding, ask: what is the room adding to this choice? What is absent that still needs space?
Your work is never alone. Place is in the room. Absence is in the room. The question is whether you let them participate with you.