Holding The Gap
There’s often a gap between where we are, and where we want to be.
On a personal level this gap can make many forms – physical, financial, emotional, career, relational. We find ourselves wanting new paths, new opportunities, wondering how to get there – or indeed, whether it is even possible.
Collectively, we’re also facing a gap.
We have the world as it is, moving through a form of unravelling that has many names: collapse, the long dark, metacrisis or even ‘the second axial age’ (this article from Otto Scharmer is well worth a read); the unravelling of unjust systems and structures that shape the world we know.
But there is also the world as it could be, and to paraphrase Arundhati Roy, on a quiet day, we may also hear her breathing. The dreaming and birth of new, more just economic models, of nonviolent movements, of communities, more robust democracy, of new calls for beautiful business.
In some cases our gap will be small; with calm waters and stepping stones guiding the way across.
For many of us though, the gaps can be large; the waters torrential, the cliffs high, and the ways through daunting and unimaginable.
And for these gaps, standing on the edge, facing it, looking to bridge it can be scary.
It is, after all, a gap for a reason. It’s made of unchartered territory, spaces we haven’t yet walked (personally or collectively), and of course, risk. The risk of failure, of loss, of the unknown.
We may naturally want to jump from one side to the other, but in doing – in missing those messy, liminal spaces - we lose the potential of the gap.
To refuse the gap – to pretend it’s insurmountable, or doesn’t exist - is to collapse into the rigidness of fact; to fall into despair, apathy, hopelessness, rage, powerlessness. Who are you to make a difference? It’s too late. The systems too powerful. What’s the point? They never listen. I feel too small. I could never do that…
It’s to stay on the shore of the world as it is.
But to ignore the gap – to jump the other side without ever entering the waters – is to bypass the hurting of our world; to be naïve to the realities, spirals and complexities of change, to ‘love & light’ the way, and to miss the depth of our becoming in our rush to reach the end.
Our work isn’t to stand on either shore; it’s to hold the gap.
Parker Palmer says it well, “The insight at the heart of nonviolence is that we live in a tragic gap -- a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be. It is a gap that never has been and never will be closed. If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility.”
But how do we do this?
There’s a poem by Rubem Alves that I love, titled What is Hope? If you’ve been through any workshop or session with me, you may have heard it – it’s one I reliably return to in the closing of our sessions.
What I love is that this poem is it’s always about the both/and of life. That in holding the gap, everything belongs; that hope is possible because of suffering, not in spite of it.
“The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness . . . “
Because the thing about ‘holding the gap’ is that both worlds are true.
It’s the work of both/and.
We still live in a reality of (unfettered, unchecked, neoliberal) capitalism, of violence and conflict, of ecosystem breakdown; and we live in a world with more possibility, one where we can create more just, loving and regenerative conditions.
When we fail to hold the both/and is when we collapse into either side of the shore.
Rubem also writes about the creative experience in what I would call holding the gap.
That the secret discipline includes, “a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved, in immediate sense experience”.
That “the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual”.
That we can use our bodies - in our stubborn commitment ‘to the future of our grandchildren’ - as “seeds of our highest hope”.
This is all the work of holding the gap – whether personally and collectively. It’s laying the path between the two shores so that we can all begin to not just hold it in tension, but create a stable bridge for others to follow.
And importantly, holding the gap is not work we can do alone. It takes effort. There can be a loneliness with seeing first what others can’t; of trusting, gathering, walking and leading the way in a time of uncertainty.
For us to hold effectively, to move the shores of the world as it is and the world as it could be closer together, it requires community.
It requires connections and prototypes and radical acts of imagination and defiance for us not to collapse into either side.
So, if you’ve seen a gap in your life or world recently, I offer you the following questions:
Where’s your gap between where you are and where you want to be? How can you hold both shores with care and potential?
As we stand collectively at this gap, what might support you - skills, wisdoms, communities - in stepping into the waters of the unknown?
Want to read the poem?
What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real
and reality less real
than it looks.
It is a hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress
is not the last word.
It is a suspicion that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible are not determined
by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection . . .
The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness . . .
Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.
It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved
in immediate sense experience
and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined love is what has given
prophets, revolutionaries and saints
the courage to die for the future they envisaged.
They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.- Rubem Alves
