We each share the chaotic gaps in familiarity and security this uncertain world invariably brings us. Imagine a smooth highway leading to a bridge that's suddenly collapsed.
There's just no way to escape or avoid the uncomfortable spaces that suddenly arise between what we have come to know and the unknown that awaits.
Divorce, for instance, naturally forces us into unknown territory, as do loss of employment, broken friendships, empty nests and relocations. It's a long list for sure.
Scottish author Margaret Silf describes such periods as akin to the uncertain space a trapeze artist experiences after releasing his grip and flying through the air, hoping his timing is precise enough to grab the receiving bar in midflight. Life can feel like that when the bottom drops out, especially when we haven't practiced grabbing a waiting bar. Instead, in most instances, there's the scary unknown.
Silf's book, The Other Side of Chaos: Breaking Through When Life is Breaking Down, is a common-sense read for everyone seeking perspective and context in their own gaps.
"What lies on the other side of chaos? Can an apparently negative experience of change be, for us, the catalyst for a new beginning, calling us forward into deeper freedom?" she asks. "No one knows and none can predict ... . Transitions are never comfortable."
Yet it's crucial that we embrace and risk these gaps as journeys toward what may be sprouting in our lives as we hurtle like reluctant time travelers through the changes from what we formerly knew and expected, Silf explains.
The gaps we choose or, more often, find thrust upon us are guaranteed to change us, regardless of how we may feel since there is no option to go back. The past is forever gone. As she puts it: "Once the chick has hatched, the parents will no longer grieve over the broken shell."
The events and choices inherent to our existence speed only in one direction and will never appear again as we gulp and stare into the oft-frightening uncertainty.
Silf adds that often these situations, combined with faith, can provide a positive place to be because periods of chaos also tell us of the likelihood that radical potentials also are "gestating within us and painfully coming to their birth" through future opportunities. We just have to realize that we have the power to embrace our attitudes and see the death of one experience as opportunity for the birth of another even better.
She asks that we each sift through our own gap experiences and recognize when what seemed to be such bad news at the time wound up being good news in the long run. Some, like Garth Brooks, might compare that with thanking God for unanswered prayers.
I reflect on my transitionary gaps, times when the future I'd expected evaporated instead into uncertainty. My initial reaction, probably like yours under similar circumstances, was to lament the loss and become concerned over what was to come.
In living through those periods across the years, I still believed intuitively that other opportunities awaited that I couldn't yet detect. And that those experiences, too, one day would become new norms in my life's journey. I had faith that would be. And in every instance, it has come to pass.
How about you, valued readers? While each story of life in the gaps will differ because of our personal experiences, there's no question in my mind that your gaps and how they evolved into new realities (regardless of whether you needlessly worried while in freefall) in many ways have resembled my own.
It seems to me the secret to consistently turning our gaps of chaos into ever-enriching fulfillments lies in adapting, faith and the choices we make. For example, if you wind up dumped in one way or another and choose not to pick yourself up and get on with living, odds are your chances for new beginnings also are pretty much nil.
In the end, as with most things, the trapeze bars at the other end of our continuing leaps into uncertainty are there waiting for us as long as we as free Americans believe they will be.
I phrase it that way because I also acknowledge how many millions across this planet live their lives without the hope their gaps will lead to anything better. They are born into gaps of uncertainty amid hatreds and turmoil and remain in those terrible places as long as they live.
One fixed door
Apparently the postmaster in Fayetteville noticed my column that wondered why the convenient, easy-access door for the citizens of Johnson to the post office on Joyce Street had for months been taped off for repairs. I found it difficult to believe it took that long to repair even a government door.
Well, I'm pleased to report the door has been repaired and has reopened, saving the good folks of Johnson at least 300 steps when they visit their mailboxes. It was the least the USPS could do after forcing the folks of this community of 3,300 to close their own post office.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.
Editorial on 07/08/2014