Living In The Gap
Mind the Gap!
Living in the Gap
by Mark Nepo
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. On 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 inner life and 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.
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 the 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.
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.
Excerpted from Drinking from the River of Light: A Life of Expression by Mark Nepo (Sounds True, September 2019)
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About the Author
Mark Nepo is the author of 21 books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Book of Awakening. Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, he is a long-term cancer survivor who devotes his writing and teaching to the journey of inner transformation and the life of a relationship. For more information, please visit: MarkNepo.com ThreeIntentions.com
