It is the writer’s privilege to help one endure by lifting up his heart.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
When I was thirty, I traveled to London for the first time to visit a friend in grad school. I immediately felt the history in the old buildings and streets. My second day there, we took the Underground from Victoria Station. As our train arrived, I realized that the space between the platform and the train was much greater than in the States. I looked at the edge of the platform. And there, etched in the concrete, was the phrase, “Mind the Gap.” The phrase instantly seemed an instruction from the gods.
Mind the gap between stillness and motion. Mind the gap between who we are and who we hope to be. Mind the gap between what’s visible and what’s not. Mind the gap between the inner life and the outer life. The phrase has stayed with me ever since—for our search for meaning depends on how we mind the gap and how we enter the spaces between things. While a tree is all leaves, the life of the tree is in the spaces filled with wind between the leaves. And while we are the sum of our actions and words, the life of who we are is in the spaces filled with Spirit between our actions and words.
In time, minding the gap leads to entering the gap, which leads to living in the spaces between what is known and what remains unknown. The gap between the details of the world is where we find the invisible energy that holds everything together. And so, one of the challenges for the writer in us is to pin down the physical details in life so the invisible can show through the spaces between them—the way a window frames a view, the way a door frames a threshold, the way painting everything that is not the path makes the path visible.
Throughout time, people have argued whether the world is only what we see or if the physical world is the manifestation of the essence of life, the way the tip of an iceberg is only what’s visible of an enormous foundation that remains out of view. Trusting that there is an Invisible Whole that brings the world into view has led to more intuitive forms of art.
In the 1930s, Surrealism was burgeoning worldwide as a means to explore the Hidden Wholeness that informs the world as we know it. Realizing that the artist’s intention was no longer the aim, painters began to experiment with techniques that would evoke paintings beyond their control. Whatever an artist could imagine was only a catalyst enlisted to release a creative force that couldn’t be foreseen.
One innovative technique was decalcomania, which, though first used in the 1700s to transfer images to pottery, was used by Surrealists to apply a wet medium, such as ink or gouache, to a sheet of paper that is then pressed against another sheet of paper. When pulled apart, unexpected patterns appear on the second sheet of paper, beyond the artist’s intention or control.
This process of image discovery offers a useful way to understand what happens to us when our intentions meet reality. In truth, it’s very rare that what we intend ever manifests exactly in the world. We often mistake the gap between what we intend and what happens as a form of failure or falling short. In actuality, it’s what we discover in the gap that causes us to grow. For the press of our intentions against reality reveals unexpected patterns that hold life’s secrets. What we view as spillage often holds the gold.
We waste too much time trying to make our intentions come true, rather than entering the unseen field that waits beyond our intentions. We waste too much energy trying to make reality mirror our dreams. The real work of experience resides in reading the unexpected patterns that the press of life reveals, finding direction and meaning there. Try as we do to resist what we’re given, the press of what we want against what we’re given is the way we discover the patterns of truth.
In the 1940s, the German photographer Lotte Jacobi kept exploring the spaces between things by moving torches and candles over light-sensitive paper and capturing the unexpected patterns that would emerge. These artistic explorations frame the creative act as a conversation with the unknown rather than the imprint of our will in shaping materials. Mind the Gap!
On my return from that first trip to London, I became a student of the gap between what we intend and what we discover. Over the years, I stopped visiting the spaces between things and started living there. That is, I started meeting the world from the inside of life rather than darting from one external circumstance to another. What I’ve learned from this is that the heart is the perceptual organ that braids the unseeable with the seeable. The heart is the instrument that connects us to the enormous foundation that remains out of view. And so, by minding the gap and living in the gap, we help each other endure, as William Faulkner says, by lifting each other’s heart.
We enter this process of connection and endurance by being faithful to the details around us, giving them our wholehearted attention until they point to the life-force between them, the way two strokes in a Sumi painting compel us to enter the charged space between them.
By its very nature, what lives underneath the physical world is hard to name. Trying to point to all that matters led me to this poem, which, like all poems, points to the spaces between the words:
Wordless Dancer
There is a dancer who sways beneath
all I know. She can’t be summoned,
only followed. I have been her appren-
tice for years. She has led me to you
and to poetry and to the soft truth
inside suffering. If pressed, I’d say
she shimmers before I sing and
thunders when I cry. She turns
every why into how and calms my
doubts the way water smoothes each
hole in sand. Oh she won’t come out
while we’re talking like this, but
only when we drop our words
and put down everything
we don’t want to put down.
One of the challenges for the writer in us is to pin down the physical details in life so the invisible can show through the spaces between them.
An Invitation to Enter the Spaces in Between
• Take a walk and find a place to sit for a while. Then, as a painter might sketch the details of the scene, describe in your journal the details before you as carefully as you can. Then, enter the gap between the details and record what you sense is there holding the details together.
• In conversation with a friend or loved one, discuss what the phrase “Mind the Gap” means to you.