Gap Happy - Finding, Minding and Mining the Gap

We have this phrase – minding the gap.  Sometimes, watch the gap.  What does this really mean?  Pay attention.   Attention to what?  To the space between the train and the platform if you are riding the subway.  To the space between one thought and the next if you are meditating.  Or go shopping if you are walking down 9th avenue in New York.  Seriously, though, my whole philosophy of health might just rest on this one idea; everything you need to know is happening in the gap. 

There are many gaps, though we usually ignore them.  Big or small, we are still terribly accustomed to avoiding the gap.  We want to know.  We want to have prepared the questions, or have the answers.  Stepping to the next platform, to the next thought, to the next “doing” is almost automatic.  We don't want to feel at a loss, be without something to hold on to.  We don’t consider that a moment of “nothing”, a moment of gap, might just be the critical moment for choosing what we do next.  Even more critically, if we allowed ourselves to rest in this gap, what would happen? 

The gap between knowing and not knowing. The gap between diagnosis and treatment. The gap between treatment and your life. The gap between knowing who you are and finding out who you are now.  All of our potential, maybe even all that we could know, seems to lie in this space where nothing and everything is happening.  Your choices live in the gap, the choices that power your health. 

Finding the gap is easy. Most often, quite literally, the gap finds us.  But, can we allow that gap to “entertain” us, stir our curiosity, crack open our hearts.  Can we step right into the gap? Can we go even further and "mine" the gap, feel and know these things that will only show themselves when we move into the gap?

There is a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in. 

                                                                     Leonard Cohen

 Crack the window, open the door.  Take a breath.  It is possible that in order to charge forward, in order to take the next moment of life in, the space in front of you is just the breath you need to find your own power and knowing.  And if you are ill, facing crisis, or maybe just ending a long day, the gap, the light, will show you how to go forward in a way that is true, a way that is you. 

Next week, powering down to power up, how resting actually fuels everything you do!