Mind the Gap

Minding the Gap with Music © 2023 Craig Dahlberg

The street troubadour resurrected familiar songs of bygone days. He lobbed his songs to anyone who would stop long enough to lend an ear and hopefully send a tip his way. As I listened, his melodies floated across the gap of the long-abandoned trolly tracks to his audience, a solitary street person, his music bridging the gap between them.

The British have a delightful cautionary expression, “Mind the Gap!”  It reminds passengers to watch out for the space between commuter train doors and the station platform. Pay attention! Put your brain into it! Not doing do so could alter—or end—your life! So, pay attention to the space around you!

Our musician friend Minded this train track Gap. His music created a bridge across the space, the Gap between him and his vagabond neighbor.

There are many “Gaps to be Minded” that appear everywhere in each of our lives. How well do we manage to “Mind the Gap”?

Fishermen Mind the Gap between the stream banks. Investors Mind the Gap between deposits and withdrawals. Students Mind the Gap between their efforts and their grades.

Here’s a bit of a strange Gap: dogs and their owners. Dog lovers must attest, at least occasionally, to cradle their faithful canine friend’s muzzle in hand, stroke her fuzzy head, peer deeply, deeply into her eyes and wonder, “I love her. Does she think about me, love me? Are our brains synchronized in some sort of Gap-Bridging brain-bond? Is she starting to think like I think? To desire what I desire? Can the two of us bridge the gap between human and animal understanding? Yes! She “gets” me! But then, suddenly, she breaks free from my eye-stare and my head-scratching grasp, yielding to baser doggy instincts, licking herself in all of “those” places, and I realize that, well—all my imagined meditations of human-to-animal societal breakthrough were just that—imagined. Minding the Gap between human and animal will wait for a more practiced Gap-Minder.

There are other more significant reasons to “Mind the Gap.” Children try to figure their parents out. Parents try to figure their children out. Cross-generations have a difficult time of it! How to cross over those blasted Gaps!

What about the friends we value so highly—yet with whom we can easily get askew? Gaps can appear even in these closest of friendships. How do we Mind these Gaps?

And now, the risky one—Minding the Gap with a spouse. There appears to be an unmistakeable “Je ne sais quoi” difference between a man and a woman—a distinct difference in perception, evaluation, activity and verbal skills. These distinctive traits are delightful and invigorating at times, confusing and frustrating at other times. Early on, with infatuation in full bloom, this Gap is small, seemingly insignificant, but if “Unminded,” the Gap can grow with the years, until the Gap is challenging to cross over. Eventually, quarreling, disrespect and indifference can find a home in this Gap, leading to who-knows-what outcomes. Counselors of various stripes may be employed to help us Mind these Gaps and Mend these Gaps.

Minding the biggest Gap of all is, in fact, the one that we might try to dance around. It’s not a Gap like the distance to the moon, or to the sun, or to a distant galaxy. Even talking into my dog’s brain is a piece of cake—or a piece of doggie treat—in comparison to this Gap.

I refer to the Mankind/God Gap. This is an oil-and-water thing. Stir them as we might, this Mankind and God Gap never really mix. We’re not God. He’s not us. What to do?

There’s a weird way forward, and it’s a big mystery at that. To bridge this Gap, it turns out that Moses had a sort of chatbox to God, like a computer creates an interface, an accessibility. Moses’ chatbox was a means of entry into God’s thoughts and language. Imagine that. Able to hear directly from the Almighty.

Moses’ chatbox wasn’t virtual; it was real, happening in real time. The Moses chatbox thing worked like this. Moses would go into the Tabernacle, a place where he would tune in to, and listen to God. We are told that in that place, in that particular space, something spectacular happened: “Between the two cherubim—the place of atonement. The Lord spoke to him there.”¹

A pretty amazing event. Truly amazing.

Sometimes when I’m at home alone, I’ll look down the driveway to be sure there’s really no one else around. Then I’ll enter the house and turn up my favorite music really, really loud, until the walls vibrate. I suppose that’s what it must have been like for Moses, Minding the Gap, listening, in that special place. In that space, the Voice between the cherubim must have really flapped the walls of that Tabernacle tent.

I would love to have heard it.

I wonder if that Voice could happen again. Perhaps turn down that volume a bit, and then a bit more, until the music fades away. And then, listen. Just listen and Mind the Gap.

¹ Numbers 7:89