My new vision is to create an AI that, while in the gap, formulates questions that allow you to self-examine, contemplate, and reflect, so the gap becomes valuable. Lining up funding and our Cluster of Elders (beta teachers); care to participate?
Wow. The gap, framed in this way, reminds me of a sabbatical rest. The point of a sabbatical, I see it as, a time of gap which helps you discern the next steps. What is beautiful about the language you used to describe the gap is that it takes away the societal understanding that you must always be doing something. Moving forward. The gap is uncomfortable because we are always moving never stopping regardless if it is feeding your spirit or slowly killing it. I love the idea of a reorganization instead of a broken part of your life. The guilt you feel no longer feels gross when you name this pause in our lives. Thank you from someone who is actively in the gap.
Good article, Marc. Although it seems clear in the article, from the responses, there might be some confusion. Please correct me if I am mistaken about your intent, Marc. This is an idea we’ve been discussing for a while, so I’d like to sharpen the semantics of the concept a little to make a distinction between a rest period and what we have been calling “the gap.” A sabbatical, a rest, or a vacation or other interim between two stages of life is a time pregnant with possibilities, but it does not necessarily follow an upset. The gap, on the other hand, is the period immediately following a challenge of some kind to the ego. It can be as simple as having hurt feelings from something said to you or it can be really “bad” news. When we are younger, often we react to the challenge with our first thought. If we are lucky, we might get to the second thought. An elder, on the other hand, comes from a more mature state, responding with the wisdom of experience and without so much of a need to be right or to win. Interactions are more win/win because the elder sees that when anyone loses, everyone loses. The elder context is more based in kindness and self love. Both a sabbatical and the gap are full of possibility, but they spring from different sources.
Marc, thank you for this description of the gap as reorganisation rather than failure. As I read it, I was struck by how close this is to what many traditions call liminal or threshold space. In my own vision-quest work, and in my work with older people, we tend to meet this more as a passage than a problem, because it rarely shows up only inside the individual. It’s shaped by body, age, place, relationships, and the natural slowing that comes when old identities loosen.
Naming it certainly helps, yet companionship and story matter too, not just concepts. I appreciated your reminder that better questions, not faster answers, are what carry us through. My own research suggests that some people, as they age, become more willing to sit with these questions and allow space for answers to emerge, though of course we all age differently and bring our own agency to that process.
Yes, patience with discomfort is antithetical to our cultural narrative. We want a pill, a syringe, or an app to immediately relieve us of the discomfort instead of asking what the discomfort is here to teach, shape, or reveal about who we are becoming.
My new vision is to create an AI that, while in the gap, formulates questions that allow you to self-examine, contemplate, and reflect, so the gap becomes valuable. Lining up funding and our Cluster of Elders (beta teachers); care to participate?
Wow. The gap, framed in this way, reminds me of a sabbatical rest. The point of a sabbatical, I see it as, a time of gap which helps you discern the next steps. What is beautiful about the language you used to describe the gap is that it takes away the societal understanding that you must always be doing something. Moving forward. The gap is uncomfortable because we are always moving never stopping regardless if it is feeding your spirit or slowly killing it. I love the idea of a reorganization instead of a broken part of your life. The guilt you feel no longer feels gross when you name this pause in our lives. Thank you from someone who is actively in the gap.
Good article, Marc. Although it seems clear in the article, from the responses, there might be some confusion. Please correct me if I am mistaken about your intent, Marc. This is an idea we’ve been discussing for a while, so I’d like to sharpen the semantics of the concept a little to make a distinction between a rest period and what we have been calling “the gap.” A sabbatical, a rest, or a vacation or other interim between two stages of life is a time pregnant with possibilities, but it does not necessarily follow an upset. The gap, on the other hand, is the period immediately following a challenge of some kind to the ego. It can be as simple as having hurt feelings from something said to you or it can be really “bad” news. When we are younger, often we react to the challenge with our first thought. If we are lucky, we might get to the second thought. An elder, on the other hand, comes from a more mature state, responding with the wisdom of experience and without so much of a need to be right or to win. Interactions are more win/win because the elder sees that when anyone loses, everyone loses. The elder context is more based in kindness and self love. Both a sabbatical and the gap are full of possibility, but they spring from different sources.
Marc, thank you for this description of the gap as reorganisation rather than failure. As I read it, I was struck by how close this is to what many traditions call liminal or threshold space. In my own vision-quest work, and in my work with older people, we tend to meet this more as a passage than a problem, because it rarely shows up only inside the individual. It’s shaped by body, age, place, relationships, and the natural slowing that comes when old identities loosen.
Naming it certainly helps, yet companionship and story matter too, not just concepts. I appreciated your reminder that better questions, not faster answers, are what carry us through. My own research suggests that some people, as they age, become more willing to sit with these questions and allow space for answers to emerge, though of course we all age differently and bring our own agency to that process.
Yes, patience with discomfort is antithetical to our cultural narrative. We want a pill, a syringe, or an app to immediately relieve us of the discomfort instead of asking what the discomfort is here to teach, shape, or reveal about who we are becoming.