We have all helped to create a world which is divided into clear opposite sides of which we are driven to take one over the other. We have drawn lines in the sand separating Liberal Democrats vs. conservative Republicans, thinkers vs. feelers, homosexuals vs. heterosexuals, Christians vs. non-Christians, optimists vs. pessimists, peaceniks and warmongers, truth speakers vs. fiction believers, and those who do altruistic good vs. those who do selfish evil.

     We have created literally thousands of such distinctions that have split the whole world in half. In between these yangs and yins of life are gaps. These are places of great learning for those who have enough courage to put aside what they think they already know for sure.

     These gaps hide the unknown creative compromises that are needed for reconciliation and unification into a more accurate and complete picture of the whole truth, which is the main goal of living. In our evolution of consciousness, we have succeeded in totally creating a sea of chaos by dismantling life and taking everything apart into this or that.

      It is now time that we invest equal intelligence and passion into restoring order by putting things back together again. We are being challenged to expand our 180-degree vision into 360-degrees and if we don’t succeed that will not be good for any of us. We simply can’t quit at half-time or the game gets forfeited.

     As part of our chaos spreading days, we originally invented words to represent various objective realities of things we perceived, experienced, intuited, believed or otherwise “knew” to be true and certain. But unfoirtunately our communication system came with inevitable dualism and built-in gaps. There is the obvious gap between the particular object and the specific words that are used to describe that object (there are literally large sections of libraries devoted to the single word love).  And of course there is an assumed gap between the speaker/writer and the hearer/reader.

     As our communication system evolved and became even more abstract and more distantly related to what the words were pointing towards, another significant, but seemingly unnoticed gap was created. This gap was between literal interpretations of the words used to describe their objects and even their beliefs or other people’s beliefs about those objects, and the more metaphorical, deeper, hidden meanings of the objects and the words. Much of this later gap is between denotative verbal communication and connotative non-verbal communication—the how of what is being said that is heard and misunderstood the most.

     It is the understanding of this last gap—between the literal and the metaphorical—where all the creative solutions to the world’s division’s lay. It is living life in this particular gap that gives us the most alive and meaningful experience in our perpetual quest to move from surviving to thriving, in being the best signature self we were born to be. Seeing and living the whole truth of life.

     The more time you spend wading in the trenches of the gaps between this and that the more you begin to see that both “illusory” halves are really just differently appearing sides to the same coin. A more important realization is that the words—which are used to describe and separate realities such as love and hate, right and wrong, good and bad or truth and fiction—are what actually cause all the confusion and discomfort, when all the inevitable miscommunication and misunderstanding occurs.

     In this sense, we get angry at what we may be wrongly interpreting the words to mean, rather than being upset about the uncomfortable realities themselves that we think the words to mean, but which we haven’t even come close to grasping. How can a well-articulated sentence, well-developed paragraph or even a superbly written book begin to communicate the accurate and complete meaning of “love?”  There are many such concepts that a whole lifetime of trying to capture their essence, fails.

     Try and follow these words closely. In a sense we become uncomfortable in order to appreciate being comfortable, so that we can eventually live more comfortably in the gap between comfort and discomfort. If this makes sense it is because you are already living there; if not you are still trying to avoid discomfort which is not possible, and then feeling more discomfort about that uncomfortable reality, which is downright foolish.

     At the point of becoming hopelessly locked into a vicious circle, it makes more sense to stop thinking about the differences between this or that, and start living the creative compromise in between. This is where we can experience pure truth directly without the contaminating effect of artificial word representations, which can only partially point in the general direction of where we all want to be. In the end, both this and that turn out to be these. The divisions are unified and if by chance they become separated again, we will at least know where they belong, by remembering.

     What is the real moral of this story? The next time you choose sides, be willing to step forward into the gap between you and your “enemy” to learn how you might be teammates. The first time that happens it is life changing to you; after that it is life-changing to others.