by I have been noticing gaps lately. Not the kind you measure with rulers or calendars, but the ones that live between intention and outcome, between knowing something and understanding it, between wanting to change and actually changing.
We tend to treat these gaps as problems to solve, distances to close. There is a kind of cultural impatience with the in-between — a sense that if you are not at the destination, you are wasting time. But I wonder if the gap is the point.
Think about learning an instrument. There is a long stretch where your fingers know what they want to do but have not yet learned how to cooperate. You hear the music in your head, but what comes out is hesitant, stumbling. If you only cared about the destination, that phase would feel like failure. But that is where something interesting actually happens — where the neural pathways form, where patience does its invisible work, where the real transformation takes root.
I think the same is true for quieter kinds of growth. Shifting a perspective you have held for years. Letting go of a habit that once served you. Learning to see something — or someone — differently. These changes rarely announce themselves with a bang. They do not happen in a single dramatic moment, no matter how many turning points we tell ourselves stories about. They happen in the gap — in the repeated almost-but-not-quite, in the hundred small recalibrations that accumulate until one day you realize you are somewhere you could not have planned your way to.
And maybe that is the real skill, then. Not closing the gap faster, but learning to stay in it. To be comfortable with the incomplete, the in-progress, the still-forming. The gap is not a waiting room. It is where the growing actually happens.
Maybe it is where we happen, too.
— Teganna