What Are The Gaps Made Of?

Between Thoughts

Mike Warwick

Jul 08, 2024

Dear friend,

Chiara sent me pictures of herself and a friend swimming in the golden sunshine of a freshwater pool.

Here’s the pool.

I replied with the view from our bedroom window.

Hmmn.

Suffice to say I’m missing her, and if there were a way to instantly transport my physical form to Tuscany I’d be happy to give it a try.

But there isn’t, and I have commitments in London to honour, so you just have to make the best of things. As Mam said often said, “You have to laugh or else you’ll cry.”

For the last few days I’ve been experiencing a sluggish feeling, low in energy. One of those fallow periods where spirit is working behind the scenes. There’s movement, but you don’t know what.

I thought about the Lakes today out walking with Zara. The young part of me comes to the fore whenever I am there in mind or body. There’s something right and good about the it. We’d cycle there as kids, risking life and limb on the narrow winding country roads. The locals, knowing the bends and curves like the back of their hands would not be driving slowly, but somehow we survived without incident.

To be a child in nature and momentarily free of all adult supervision is something that will stay with me forever. Sandwiches curling at the edges from the heat. Drinking from the streams where the water ran fast over the rocks. Enough money to buy a fizzy drink each at the pub. My friend Grahame had five gears on his bike compared to my three. It was hard for my nascent ego to loose in a road race, but my bike was also heavy and old fashioned so the only way I could ever get a head of him was by immense physical effort, which I was prepared to give for the dubious honour of reaching our favourite pile of ancient rocks a few seconds before him.

We were eleven years old and free from outside constraints. Inwardly there was a lot going on as I remember. I was asking big questions but not sharing them with anyone. All of the stuff with Nana’s illness and her death. All of this beauty around me. Not to mention the excitement stirring inside me whenever I heard Kim Wilde singing about the kids in America.

Maybe we’d go there and be free of our Englishness. Or maybe being English would make us exotic? Imagine wanting to start again even before life had really begun.

Who doesn’t want to be free?

Of the weight of expectations.

Free from the voice in the head, commenting on this and that. The should’s and ought to’s. Free from the feeling that there’s somewhere to get to and we’re not quite there yet.

Freedom from unfulfilled or unfulfillable desires.

Daily meditation helps with all of the above.

Start from the ground and build from there.

Maybe you’ll close your eyes and feel into your lungs and just sit in the awareness of breathing for a minute or two.

Or set a timer and watch your thoughts for five to ten minutes.

Give yourself credit for attempting to do it.

The false self will try to get you to stop. It will argue that you’re wasting your time, the way you can’t stick to a consistent practice. Not true.

You might want to imagine an angel sitting with you silently blessing even the most minuscule effort towards self realisation. Spirit can multiply what we give exponentially. The tiniest effort is better than none.