The Observation Series: The Gap

Letter 3: The Gap

I know exactly who I am becoming.  I just don't always show up as him.

Some days the gap is small.  A moment of impatience I catch before it lands.  A reaction I pause before I give it.  A breath I actually take.  Those days feel like progress.  Like the work is working.

Other days the gap is wide.  I snap when I said I wouldn't.  I reach for the phone when I promised myself I wouldn't.  I show up distracted in a room full of people who deserved my presence.  And then comes the familiar voice: you know better than this.  You're supposed to be further along by now.

But here is what I am learning about grace: it is not the reward you give yourself after you finally get it right.  It is the thing that makes getting it right possible at all.

Growth is not interested in your timeline.  It does not care about your intentions, or how many letters you have written about presence.  It moves at the pace of real life.  A life which is messy, nonlinear, and completely unbothered by your expectations of yourself.

The gap is not getting bigger.  Your awareness is.

Give yourself that.  Not as an excuse.  As fuel.

Soulspoken is not a uniform for the perfect.  It is an anchor for the in-between.  It is what I put on when I need to close the gap.

When I look in the mirror and see the logo, I am not looking at who I am pretending to be.  I am looking at a reminder of who I choose to return to.

We do not wear this because we have arrived.  We wear it because we are honest about the distance we still have to travel.  We wear it to make the gap a little smaller today than it was yesterday.

The work is not about eliminating the gap entirely.  The work is about refusing to live comfortably inside of it.

More presence.  Less noise.