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!
Is Your Health a Matter of Choice?
Some of the choices are obvious. You can close the curtains, open the closet, eat spinach, live in the city or sleep with chickens. Some are not so obvious. Why do you like the color blue? Why are you attracted to red-haired women? Why do you like being by the ocean?
When it comes to your health, which is it? Is the choice obvious or obscure? How do you know what your choices are? How do you choose something, the right thing, the timely thing, when things are always changing?
Your health is like the weather. Both are relationships between many elements in constant motion. Fortunately, a relationship, is something that you can enter, something you can participate in. What does it mean to enter a relationship with your health? It means you are willing to check inside, to see how you feel no matter the "weather." When it is sunny, you might say, I'd rather sit inside. On a rainy day, you might say, I'd rather take a walk. And even if it is cold or you are tired, you might honor your feelings by dressing up warmly, wearing a hat and heading out. A relationship means you show up, check in, and decide on the spot how you wish to participate on any given day.
No matter what the weather, inside or out, only you know what is happening inside you! I’m not saying you know the information, the numbers, the statistics, the lab values. No, I’m saying you know how you feel. You may not have a word for how you feel, you may not have ever felt this way before, but still the knowing is there. You have feelings for a reason, even if they are messy, inconvenient and not good with words. Your knowing, your wisdom comes through your feelings, your experience and insight that is unique to you and cannot be known by any other person.
When it comes to your health, you can’t afford not to know what your feelings are. And you can’t afford not be the one to choose. Your health is powered by your choice! You don’t choose the weather and most likely you don’t choose illness when it happens to you, but, that doesn’t mean you don’t have choices. When you don’t feel well, it is so easy to wish for someone else to make choices for you, easy to think that if someone else makes all the decisions you will feel better. We all want to feel well and we want to know how to make that happen.
Change happens. Virtually unstoppable, really. Yet, if we test the prevailing winds, feel the weather so to speak, we can know what is happening for us. Even when we find ourselves in a situation that seems over our heads, something we know nothing about, our bodies can tell us where our choices lie. Let others make the chicken soup, drive you to the doctor and rub your feet. But save the choices for you and your body. You are the only one living in your body and will be the only one having to live with whatever choice you make.
No matter what the choices are, the BEST medicine will always be the medicine YOU choose. On finding the gap where those choices lie next week…
