"Mind the gap" is a warning to train passengers to take caution while crossing the gap between the train door and the station platform. It was introduced in 1969 on the London Underground.
– Wikipedia
Life is full of chasms. As we go about our daily lives, we walk, bike, and drive across bridges. We take trains under rivers, harbors and bays. We even "hop" across ponds, states and continents in jets to get closer to people, places and things that are further from us than we would like. Each time we cross one of these gaps between what we know now, to what we want to know a few minutes from now, we are really going over the unknown. Even in a glass-bottomed boat, we don't know exactly what lies beneath us, deep in the murky waters of those waterways we wish to forgo. In the same way, at 30,000 feet, we don't know the communities, families and ecosystems that exist on the ground below us. It truly is the abyss.
And it's not just in transit that we are crossing over the unknown. We are doing it when we are standing still. It happens moment by moment, in conversations with our loved ones, it happens in our day dreams, in our nightmares and it happens when we are simply lost in thought. We know what we are now, and we know where we were then, but how did we get here? What were we thinking and feeling during those lost seconds? We often do know. We often, don't even want to know. We simply find ourselves where we are, as if this might be the only place we could possibly be.
Our minds are constantly shifting. In fact, our whole beings are constantly shifting. We are one way with one friend, and another way with a different friend. When did we change? Do we even notice? What was the impetus for the transition? We make these kinds of evolutions within discussions with the same person as well. We may be laughing with our best friend one minute and in the next minute, we might find ourselves telling them about how our relationship with our partner is slipping away. These kinds of shifts happen all the time. They are daily part of our human experience.
By tuning in to these gaps in our memories, what might we learn about who we are, how we think or even why we do what we do? As a psychotherapist. I am often astonished at the insights people gain when they come in to tell me about how they noticed that they always do one thing right after another thing happens to them. They'll comment (with their own astonishment) about how long they had been repeating said pattern and how many consequences they had experienced as a result and had never noticed their unconscious commitment to the routine. We will often use these experiences as springboards for further insight, probing deeper into the moment by moment chains of thoughts and feelings that accompany their behavioral motifs. In fact, it is often the case that it is here, in these spaces where people find the greatest sources of information about themselves which aids them to further their goals of transformation.
We are constantly being triggered. For me, one tiny scent of eucalyptus and I my mind effortlessly drifts back to holiday and "back-to-school" shopping excursions to the mall that was located about an hour away from where I grew up. There was a department store there that apparently used the leaves of eucalyptus trees to decorate the olfactory atmosphere of their giant retail establishment. The next thing I know, I'll be lost in thought, reminiscing about the year that I got my first pair of Levi's jeans or the Christmas I spent in the bathroom because I got food poisoning from the Christmas Eve shrimp cocktail.
If we tune into our moment to moment experience, we begin to notice more closely our subtle (and not so subtle) shifts in mood, thought and behavior. We may find out that our friend Jessica repeats a phrase note for note the way our grandmother did. We may notice that the sound of a whistle, any whistle, reminds us how we were always picked last in gym class. Not that I would know anything about that!
For some, tuning into our moment to moment experience and noticing the empty spaces in our consciousness my be painful. Our brains have a way of keeping traumatic material out of our awareness because it is painful and risks overwhelming us. Quicker then we are really aware, our brains notice stimuli that suggest danger (physical or emotional) and keeps moving so as not to have to square off with that unfelt but subtly sensed anxiety connected to something in our past. But here too, there is room for healing. It is only when we become aware of these lapses that we can begin to loosen their pull on us to remain unaware, discreetly whisked away from our painful memories and non-memories (yes, they are there too). When we become aware of them, we can then begin to understand them, to make the unknown sections of time known and therefor less frightening. The only way we ever realized that there was no monster under the bed was to get down there and look. And while we may have found that favorite toy we lost several months back, we never really found any goblins under there.
For others, it may not be traumatic memories that we are trying to avoid. It may simply be that our ever-shifting consciousness is being diverted by exciting new stimuli that shifts us away from one thought, feeling or memory and toward another. Here too there is value in tuning into our semi-conscious experience. When we know what sensations we have been skipping over, we can add new depth to our experience. We can linger in those thoughts, we can understand ourselves better, and we can make deeper meaning of our lives. We can facilitate the integration of our daily lives!
So what of these gaps? The unknown space between where we are and where we are have been more potency then we think. When I ride the ferry home from work in the afternoon, I and most of my fellow riders are staring off into the distance. We are not quite at work where we are comfortable in whatever roles we have been hired to occupy and we are not quite home, where we will be safe with loved ones. We are in transition. The physical manifestation of the gap doesn't allow us to be on solid ground and this often prompts us to stop and to think. In these times, there is finally time to think! There is time to deeply take in our surroundings, to get closer to what we actually think about a vexing issue or to simply think about how we need to call our moms.
So the next time you find yourself in a mental space that is "here" but you realize you are no longer where you "were" consider stopping to ponder what was happening when you were neither here nor there. What thoughts might have crossed your mind? What delicate little feelings might have washed over you while you were looking the other way? These spaces are opportunities for healing, growth and transformation and they are happening even now, as you read this blog. The London Underground wants you to "mind the gap" for your safety so you don't fall into the abyss beneath the train. I want you to "mind the gap" for your safety as well. When you notice you've been in one, are in one or are drifting toward one, mind it closely, you never know what you might learn bout your experience that you never knew was there.