The Space Between
An inconclusive view on taking a break from the gears we turn
I wrote this piece in reflection of leaving college, going into the unknown, and unexpectedly finding more aspects of life than I knew to exist. I left one world, and before leaping to the next of post-grad life, I took time to learn, discover, and in doing so realized the world ahead that would never be the same. For this time I’m in, I am in between.
Expect metaphors ahead.
It seems that all of those around me are a product of the mills we put them through. That’s what life is, to an extent: living in a mill, a system designed to design our lives, dictate how we spend our time, and outline what it is that we should enjoy doing.
Where I exist now is in a limbo — tucked in the gap between the gears of this machine we call life, living between college and the world beyond and ultimately confused on how everything that I currently doing feels to be outside of this machine, apart from it, looking to the gear beside me and seeing the life I left behind, a world of college students advancing their skills, building their careers, enjoying the thoughtless moments of youth that have been promised to comprise our good ol’ days.
What I would like to explore in this essay is the space between the gears that we so rarely see ourselves caught in. I’d like to share my own experience here, how in falling I found myself and became cursed.
What happens when you get caught in the space between the gears? What happens when you can, even for an instance, see the machine for what it is? And when doing so… how do you grapple with the fact that you’re plagued with the curse of believing in the world beyond, above those that satisfies the peripherals of the rest?
What I struggle to wrap my head around, now, is what to do next. There’s always a next gear in the machine, always a path forward to take that makes sense. But what to do when you look at all paths and somehow you can see the destinies that ly at the end of each, and in every permutation you see you would have hoped for more?
This gets at the scholar’s greatest curse. That in breaking from tradition — something you, surely, mastered as a star student — and found learning in other, more profound ways, other places, people, works, in addition to what you were fed between the teeth of your gear — you became knowing, mature, and utterly de-romantacized of the world and what was in it. What do you do when you, having grown your identity’s wings and wanting more than the machined life you came from but not seeing through the fog of the unknown for where it could go… what does one do in such a situation? How much time can you spend in between the gears before you give up hope of ever finding your way out of the machine, a ticket whose end is sure to bring you to the enlightenment of true meaning and purpose, a wholesome time spent on this earth that others dismiss as an attainable reality? When do settle on what that path could become?
These are the thoughts, circulating around my head. I view the enlightened — by tech standards, mind you — as those that did internalize their ability to create from thin air and combine passion with purpose to build projections of their mind. Some are artists, and some are founders. People who have reached the state of designing their own machines. People who are fearless to their deepest core, but fearlessness is impossible for such emotional beings as us to attain. Fearless in the definition that when fear surfaces, it is of an opposite polarity from judgement, so while they two may co-exist, they don’t mix.
That is the place I left behind: the old gear we were running on, and from it I leaped into the suspended, empty, amorphous space in between the two rigid gears.
Now to begin with metaphor number 2: falling.
I floated, then fell. my surroundings transformed from the inside of a machine to a sea of color, light. A whole sky. Down, down, down, I fell and flailed into the unknown, heart a-blazing with a thirst for adventure and mind eager to discover what if the hints for what might ly in the world of tech and adulthood could hold.
I unexpectedly found a stronghold here, a person-culture fit if you will. The people in tech spoke my language — one that transcended the usual barriers of age and ethnicity. They, too, were beings of whose eyes were electrified, fixated on opportunity and enchanted with the toys of the present; minds that, after being free from the machine for so long, were unique, boundless, talking so casually of possibility and acting as though they had all of the cards in their hand. They made huge things from the perspective of being inside the machine just a mere afterthought. Anything was possible, there. There minds saw no walls, rather entire universes waiting to be traversed existed within them.
They inspired me. I opened myself up, I became a student of the skies. Glued between people, places, and my laptop, I learned more about their world, and in doing so, with every new datapoint I charted in these skies, I turned back to myself. I was developing a voice, a brand, and a new propensity to hungrily gobble at every ounce of learning and exploration I could find. I was having fun, here in the space in between the gears.
The discoveries were endless, with everyday holding something new. I discovered the power of networks, of finding friends in the most unlikely of places and of every single thing that happens to you a function of everything that has come before it, and a function of the impact that you’ve had on others. I discovered purposefully-minded people — they were built with some kind of agenda in mind and carried themselves with such surety and passion for what they do in the most non-boisterous ways imaginable. I was attracted to the aura they casted on others as a result of this display of passion, and it was one I began to inherit for myself. I found role models to follow, and in emulating what they did mixed with my own persona I found that between these two gears existed a life more interesting than the one I was destined for — with higher chances of uncertainty on every scale, and it was in this uncertainty that I found the variable reward to be worth every dice roll I took. I knew that tech culture presented a greater fluctuation of highs and lows, but that seemed to match up well with my rather extremist, somewhat obsessive and effusively energetic personality nicely.
In exploring and expanding my mind, I began my plunge into the unknown soaking with experience. Experience, travel, friendships: these are the tools that one may use to broaden one’s mind. But what I realized, as my fall continued, was that in broadening my mind I realized how little I actually know about myself. I was still uncontrollably flailing through the air, jutting out in every which direction, feeling no sense of stability. Noise and excitement aside, I felt lost and alone.
These looming feelings persisted, so much that I forced myself to come to terms with them — with myself.
Before lurching into the unknown, I didn’t actually know I existed. Bear with me here: I of course realized that yes, I am a living being on this planet, but past that, I supposed I was a culmination of the great things I did in school and in sports and the friendships I had, but I didn’t truly know me. What was there to know, past what I enjoyed doing, what I was good at, what I liked and disliked?
It was in falling, you see, that I was forced to uncover all of the layers of who I was. I’d always heard and seen these notions of discovering oneself, but I hadn’t internalized any of it. Not until the act of changing circumstance: of uprooting myself from the mill, of which I picked an identity going into it, and throwing myself into the abyss, broadening my mind with experience, was I able to look back and finally see my perception of myself surface.
“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” — Socrates
But also
To Be Old and Wise, You Must First be Young and Stupid
I suppose I was doing a little bit of both.
It has been about 9 months of an exploratory period of my life. Not even been one year since I leaped from my gear to reside at the in between. I have many, many more layers to go until my time runs out. Though now, I have an idea of how to do it.
I wondered how long I could live in between gears — how long anyone can, at that. In between two selves, the former unrecognizable from me now, the future changed forever due to my sabbatical in the middle, and where I lie now, at the in between, in a space some would consider lost if I hadn’t been surrounded by friends also in this state, all of us falling, gliding through the air with no perches seeing with it to land upon so continue our flight it is. Of course it isn’t dark here, in the air. As I said, the air is filled with winds of unforeseen occurrences and great fun, of expectations that get toppled by new heights, of laughter and of creation, and of self discovery of what is left of us when you remove us from a mill working to seamlessly, of when you see what a monkey does when given the lever controlling the machine around it. When you’re at the in between, life sees small, distant, and attainable. At the in between, together, we wade the skies, full of light and color, of change and fervor.
It’s in living in the space between that one truly identifies who oneself is. When constraints are lifted, when the identity you chose as part of the mill is gone, that you are alone with who you are: a flailing thing, falling from the sky. This was me, at least, until, with time, I realized the wings I’d always had but never knew to utilize. It’s in the going into the unknown that I found myself, and united myself with the agency I knew to possess, agency that was desperate to find something to latch onto and to execute on (which resulted in my involvement in a lot of on-campus clubs).
When you’re failing in the air, it’s important to understand the medium in which you are traversing. The sky is a 3-D space of blankness. Soaring through it is like painting on a blank slate, but this time, you have 3 dimensions at play. There is no ground in sight.
On growing wings, though, there is a more that exists: a world beyond the clouds, of fulfillment and wonder, of creation and fun. One that exists to those who are the ones to exist in between the gears, to soar through the air and to let oneself flail and flail and try and tribulate until one becomes knowing of thyself and from a unity of agency and discovered purpose… finds wings to fly.
What kind of world would exist if more people allowed themselves to flail through the air, without judgement? How many more wings would be utilized, how much more agency would meet personal purpose?
I recognize, in this metaphor, that finding the space to fly was a privilege. The ability to leap, to chase the things that brought energy to me, to be rogue from the mill and make my own free choice to return when the time is right. To live by my own interests and agenda, to effuse myself into a 3-D canvas with every motion, to bring others along for the ride and find new gusts of wind in the relationships and learnings that each person brings, to find new fulfillment in helping others to lift their wings a little higher — all a world in itself untouched by so many, whose gears of life are tight, fast, tediously crunching along with no gaps at all to be explored. People who can’t afford the luxury of falling. Having gaps between your gears, if you have them, is a gift. The time spent apart from an agenda is an opportunity to find yourself. If you’re at a crossroads, lost, but have a gap to spare, I advise to give some time residing at the inbetween.
Perhaps, if you don’t spend some time flailing uncontrollably through the skies, you’ll never learn to fly.
This is the status I found myself in late 2022. The next gear of my life lay awaiting the electrification I held in my hand. It would be unlike what it would have been had I not spent time in exploration, for I enter the next chapter of my life with wings to fly rather than calloused hands to spin the gears. Things became infinite in my travels. Possible in my accumulated friendships. Beaming with capability I stand at the cliff’s edge, an intersection of agency and purpose, winds spread wide, just waiting for the moment when I’m ready to jump.