The Space Between
By Sarah Kremer
Last month I was guiding a climbing trip to Virginia. We were about a quarter of the way through my shift of driving, somewhere in Pennsylvania. I was in a quiet moment as my podcast ended and I had yet to choose what to listen to next. Quiet chatter and the occasional giggle drifted from the kids in back of the van. My co-pilot was passed out, but Google Maps was ever so slowly counting down the miles as we rolled south. It was really peaceful; or it could have been.
I felt a small familiar knot of dread start to form deep in my belly. I was standing on the edge of an ocean of anxiety and the tide was starting to lap at my toes.
Long drives are often really hard for me. The long stretches of quiet and relative boredom are an open door for my anxiety and obsessive thoughts to stroll in. Without distraction, the unease can mount to full on panic. Podcasts are my antidote for quieting the noise - I learn something, laugh, or at least find some distraction long enough to get to my destination or for the panic to pass.
I’m currently reading Eckhardt Toll’s “The Power of Now”. In it, he introduces the practice of noticing the space between thoughts. Don’t worry about the content of the thoughts themselves, he says, just notice the space in-between and try to lengthen it.
I had never thought of my thoughts this way. I treated them more like a game of whack-a-mole. Any time an unwanted thought popped up I pounced, trying to beat it down as quickly as possible. But, as anyone who knows the game knows, the faster you bash the little guy down, the faster the next one pops up. It’s ineffective and exhausting. I was tired of being exhausted by my thoughts.
As the highway rolled by, I decided to turn the flow of my thoughts into a little game. I started my stopwatch and waited to catch the space between my thoughts. Each time a thought popped up, I hit Lap to reset. The goal was to not engage or judge my thoughts, just notice them come and go and try to lengthen the time in between.
At first my mind was quiet, then I felt rather amused with my little game before realizing that was a thought. Lap. I noticed the space between thoughts and floated there for half a minute, until the next thought came. Lap. Then another thought popped up; Lap. Shit I’m really bad at this. Lap. No, no judgment, just notice the space in between. Lap. As the game went on, it was fun to observe the variation in the time I spent between thoughts. I started to notice patterns, that my thoughts would come like sets of ocean waves; one after another in quick succession before a long period of quiet. The longer I played, the longer the stretches of quiet became. However, it was not linear. Even after setting a new “high score” for time between thoughts, a new set would roll through in fairly quick succession. The return of thoughts wasn’t defeat or regression, it was just an indication of the surf forecast. After about 45 minutes of lapping my stop watch and exploring the space between thoughts, I reset my watch and turned some music on. I felt different; this time I turned the music on because I wanted to hear it, not to drown anything out. Turning my meditation into a game encouraged me to keep trying. Noticing the space between thoughts drew my attention towards the quiet, rather than increase the tension and awareness of noise.
A few weeks after that long drive I was sitting on the beach, watching the way the sea grew calm after each set of waves rolled through. As I watched people move into the water and out through the break, I realized that I already knew how to navigate an ocean of thoughts. You have three options when a wave approaches: you can plant your feet and brace hard, you can dive through and pop out the other side or you can jump up and let yourself float as the wave rolls through. The easiest option is to float through the waves until the set finishes and the quiet space between returns.
