"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." ― Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke tells us to "live the questions," but sometimes I wonder if it's not about living the gaps between them as well.
50,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day. Numbers so large they blur into abstraction. In a fraction of a second, there's a pause and the chatter ceases.
Who am I in that gap?
It's a question that tickles the edges of spirituality, philosophy, and neuroscience. Descartes told us, "Cogito, ergo sum." I think, therefore I am. But what about when we don't think? Are we less 'us'? Or perhaps more?
Virginia Woolf called these interstitial moments "moments of being." Glimpses of unfiltered reality, a backdrop so often obscured by the "cotton wool" of everyday life. Are these gaps our 'moments of being,' or perhaps 'moments of becoming’?
moments
the silence in a song
the quiet before the storm
the unsaid "but" lingering at the end of a sentence
the hollow space inside a bell
the emptiness that makes a room a room
In meditation, the goal isn't thoughtlessness but a heightened awareness of thoughts, as they pass through your mind like a fast flowing river. The "I" that watches the thoughts is like a bird perched high above, witnessing but not getting entangled. But what are we without our thoughts? Is it a barren land or fertile soil—tabula rasa or a canvass splashed with invisible ink? In poetry, the space between words, the line breaks, the stanzas—all breathe life into the poem. Likewise, the "I" between thoughts is not a vacuum but charged space, full of potential and gravity, like dark matter in the universe.
Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones says, "First thoughts have tremendous energy. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.”
So, who am I between two thoughts?
A seeker in a landscape of fleeting certainties, perhaps? A hiker in a canyon echoing with the shouts of my own queries and convictions, pausing for a drink of stillness? A reader flipping through the pages of an unwritten book, fingers tingling at the touch of invisible ink?
In that gap, I am both more and less myself—like a note in a melody, defined as much by the silence that surrounds it as by its own sonic signature. There, in that gap, I am the unspoken word, the unpainted canvas, the unwritten poem. I am all potential and no form; I am the gaze that makes the sky more than just weather.
That's me. Now, who are YOU between two thoughts?
