The spaces we inhabit do more than surround us—they quietly teach us who we are becoming.
Spaces of Existence Volume Two: Understanding Who We Are – Getting to Who We Want to Be opens as both map and meditation, inviting readers into a world where earth, memory, faith, suffering, choice, history, and human relationships are not separate subjects but interconnected “spaces” pressing in on the soul. Dr. Arnold Thompson frames existence as a series of influences moving from the outside in—what he calls a kind of “gravity”—asking how land, environment, culture, knowledge, pain, family, fear, hope, and belief all help form the inner self. The result is not a linear argument so much as an unfolding landscape of thought, where theology meets lived experience and personal memory expands into a much larger meditation on being human.
The atmosphere of the book is reflective, searching, and deeply personal. Thompson moves from the volcanic mountains and salt pond of his St. Kitts childhood to the raising of pigeons, from nature and place to questions of trauma, identity, and the soul’s formation. A boy watching pigeons always return home becomes a doorway into the idea that human beings, too, never fully escape the places that first formed them. A vanished salt pond becomes more than memory; it becomes a meditation on loss, change, and the way early environments remain alive inside us long after the visible landscape has altered. This is a book that treats memory not as nostalgia, but as evidence of how place continues to shape personhood.
What gives the read its distinct pull is its refusal to separate the spiritual from the practical. Earth is not merely scenery here. It is friend and foe, cradle and warning, beauty and danger. The self is not presented as isolated or self-invented, but as something constantly being formed by forces beyond it—natural, historical, relational, moral, and divine. Thompson’s visual “Model of Spaces of the Universe” reinforces this vision, placing the human self in dynamic relationship with God, creation, family, truth, suffering, faith, time, and choice.
That perspective feels especially rooted in the life of its author. Dr. Arnold Thompson’s long background in ministry, theology, teaching, and public speaking gives the book the sense of a lifetime of thought being gathered into one sustained exploration. For readers drawn to spiritually engaged nonfiction, philosophical reflection, and books that ask not just how to live but how to understand the forces already shaping a life, this volume offers an expansive doorway inward.
Before we can become who we want to be, we must learn to recognize the worlds that have already been shaping us.
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