The Space Between Us

Kindness has gracious eyes; it is not small-minded or competitive; it wants nothing back for itself.  Kindness strikes a resonance with the depths of your own heart; it also suggests that your vulnerability, though somehow exposed, is not taken advantage of; rather it has become an occasion for dignity and empathy.  Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has the depth of color and patience to illuminate what is complex and rich in difference.

John O’Donahue To Bless the Space Between Us

 

Those I am closest to I know the least.  The space between us the largest.  I can feel a gnawing pain of not being closer, a yearning to stitch this gap together so that I might know and be known more fully.  It can feel like bad luck to have been born into a family where I did not fit easily, to be distant from those closest to me.  But as I mature in my spiritual practice, what I see also is that the spaces between us come into relief only with those with whom we are the closest to.  It is part of the territory of intimacy. These gaps teach us how to be kinder, easier, and more patient with ourselves and with others. 

When you first meet someone, it can feel as if you know them easily and effortlessly.  After a walk in the woods, a swim at the pond, conversation over a drink at a local cafe, you might feel like soul mates.  In this “early days” connection, what feels like intimacy, however, is more likely your projecting onto the new person yourself, your inner belief systems and ways of seeing the world.  We think we know others by what they say, how they look and move, what they laugh at.  But this knowing only scratches the surface.  Our brain fills in the gaps with information that comes from our beliefs about ourselves and the world.      

The longer we know someone, after a multitude of conversations, shared meals or sleepless nights, the projection starts to wear thin from its constant rubbing up against the real other.  Overtime, we get a truer glimpse of who they are that is free from our own projections.  This can cause anger, confusion, disruption as the space between seems to widen but it is also the first step towards a deeper intimacy.  The intimacy of seeing others as they are and not how we hoped, expected, imagined, and needed them to be.  Because we are continually unfolding, the knowing of ourselves and each other will always be in-process.  The inner face with which we see ourselves is not a perspective that we can fully share with any other.  It is a deeply intimate portrait which we can spend many years hiding from and avoiding.  Like our own dying, it is a threshold that we cross alone.

The container that holds our relationships together with their necessary spaces is kindness and compassion which is a much more generous stance than the early projections could have allowed.  There is tenderness for ourselves in all our confusion, vulnerability, and fear and the thresholds we must cross alone. The great harvest of this work is inner companionship which takes the pressure off of our needing others to tend to our hearts and fill our longings in ways that they never could.  We become the stewards of our own hearts and from this are in a better position to offer others kindness, patience, and understanding to others.