Rosalie had grown up on a small horse farm in southern Kentucky, where she spent her afternoons mucking stalls and bathing and feeding the horses. She was especially attuned to the horses’ eating patterns and energy and was always the first to notice when one of the herd was ill. So it was a surprise to no one in her family when she declared she’d be going to veterinary school.
It was there that she met Eric, whose bold confidence reminded her of her grandfather. They formed a fast friendship and decided that they would be excellent business partners one day. Rosalie’s clinical excellence and his business savvy seemed well-suited for a practice, and within a few years of graduation they’d built a thriving clinic.
Rosalie felt lucky in those early days. She and Eric had found a good rhythm, and the practice was growing quickly. They’d hired several more clinicians and a growing team of support staff. But nearly a decade in, Eric had started to seem different. His attitude was cooler and distant, and he seemed to be making more decisions without even consulting her. She could tell he didn’t seem to value all she was doing for the clinic, and his comments started to get snide. Rosalie tried talking to him many times, even bringing in a consultant to help them work through whatever was happening, but nothing seemed to shift.
When Eric wouldn’t change, Rosalie tried to put her efforts elsewhere. She worked tirelessly with the staff while still treating as many animals as she could. She focused on marketing the practice, attending conferences, and learning new techniques. While she knew Eric was wrong about her lack of value, his comments had affected her, and she found herself pouring all of herself into trying to prove her worth.
Despite the countless late nights and desperate attempts to improve things with Eric, it was becoming clear that this wasn’t working. Things were tense and the business was suffering from their misalignment. Rosalie was miserable, and started dreading coming to work. She consulted an attorney to find out what splitting the business might look like. What she learned devastated her.
The attorney explained that the initial operating agreement outlined that if either of them chose to leave, they would be walking away with only a portion of the tangible assets – not the actual value of the business. Rosalie did the math and realized that exiting would leave her with just barely more than what she’d started with all of those years ago, despite the decade of sweat and tears she’d put in. It wouldn’t be enough to start something new, she worried. She was so frustrated with herself for letting Eric draft that operating agreement. More than that, she was filled with grief and fear.
Rosalie faced what felt to her an impossible choice: stay in a dysfunctional and perpetually stressful situation or walk away from everything she had built. The latter felt like a monumental ask of herself. The clinic was everything to her – her life’s work – and it was her financial security. She had no idea what would come next, or even how she could get to the next without resources to do so.
She spent months agonizing over the decision, trying to work it out on paper. But spreadsheets couldn’t do what she was ultimately wanting – eliminate the fear. She knew that her freedom would cost her security and her current identity. She knew that from the outside it would look like collapse. She knew many would think she was crazy, and she wondered if she was.
But inside her a quiet but persistent voice continued to echo, telling her that she didn’t need to know what the future held or how she would get there. That it was enough to know that this reality wasn’t what she wanted. Not this, it urged. It was time to take a leap.
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If you’re like me, you’ve heard of a quantum leap – a sudden, dramatic burst of forward momentum, often used to describe some profound change in one’s life – but you might not know the physics behind the metaphor. But then recently I heard a physicist actually explain what’s happening. A quantum leap is what happens when an electron, a subatomic particle, is transitioning from one energy state to another, higher energy state inside an atom. Scientists describe that we would expect this process to be like stair steps – to see the electron going up the steps from one level to another. But instead, the electron simply appears in the next state – seeming to leap forward without occupying all the space in between.
It’s easy to romanticize the quantum leap. Who wouldn’t want to propel forward like that, bypassing all of the drudgery of incremental change?
But as the physicist was describing it recently, I heard a part that caught my attention. She explained that in that transition from the lower to the higher state, the electron is disappearing into the quantum gap – a space in-between and undefined. Importantly, it’s not a physical space, but a gap that no one can see and no one can really even comprehend. In physics terms, what we’re describing is possibility, actually – the unknowable gap between what was and what’s to be.
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When things start to fall apart, there’s an understandable impulse to cling. We cling to what’s familiar and especially to what we think may be able to be saved. It’s not a bad impulse, per se, and it’s certainly understandable. Our attachment to what we know and think we can rely on is among the strongest of our human attachments.
When our ideas or our relationships or our institutions are fracturing, we often hustle harder to make them work. There’s a level of this that seems smart and responsible. We don’t want to abandon something just because it’s showing wear.
But there’s a level of effort that many of us get to, where we’ve gotten so practiced at trying to fix or rescue that we’ve stopped actually looking at what’s worth saving. Our arms are so tired from holding up the crumbling walls that we’re too exhausted to see what else is standing.
Sometimes this is as much a function of habit as anything else. We’re used to playing this role and making things work, and we’re not so used to checking the foundation. Doing what we’ve always done is a powerful spell to break.
But I believe there’s another reason that we stay with our clinging and our fixing, sometimes long after we should, and that’s the deep fear we carry about stepping into the gap.
I’d like to tell you that the gap isn’t such a scary place, or even that you can avoid it if you want a change badly enough. But I think I’d be lying if I said either of those things. To start with the later, wanting something different – knowing we need something different – certainly helps with leaping into the gap, but I’m not sure it makes it any less terrifying. It’s sort of a myth that we carry about change that if we focus on all the reasons for it, it will feel easier. The problem with that is that reasons are usually logical and intellectualized, and fear is an embodied response that’s so much deeper and older than our perfectly articulated reasons.
The fact is that gap is scary, at least if we are talking about real, transformational change. The gap, by its very nature, is unpredictable and unknowable. It may require us to disappear for a while, at least in the ways that we have known ourselves.
Most of us come to know ourselves based on the contours of our lives. Our rhythms and routines. Our favorite coffee and the type of music we can’t stand and what side of the bed we sleep on. What we do and who we love and how we spend holidays. We have built a sense of what it means to be us by constructing our walls and painting them our favorite colors, letting them demarcate what’s us and what’s not. It’s what’s been called constructing the ego, and it’s all a very human process.
And then, at least some of us will come upon a point in our lives where we are faced with a choice (and some of us won’t have a choice at all) about whether to leave the house we’ve so carefully built and jump into the gap. We’ll often sit in indecision for a very long time as we contemplate whether we can tolerate the gap.
The truth is that we’ll never know ahead of time whether we can tolerate it. It’s a disappearing act, maybe a form of disintegration. I was told once that the ego doesn’t evolve so much as disintegrates and reconstructs. It would be more convenient if that wasn’t true, but I tend to believe it is.
What I can tell you, though, now that I’ve perhaps painted a scary – but hopefully truthful – picture, is that we always come out of the gap, and we always do so in a higher state. I don’t mean always more conventionally successful or with an easier life. But anyone I know who has ever leapt into the gap emerged braver, more humble, truer – a more grounded and connected version of themselves. If I’m honest, they are the best people I know.
And lest you think otherwise, they didn’t start out with any more bolder than the rest of us. They were just willing or forced, at some point, to let go of their attachment to certainty. There is just no way to see what’s next until you fully let go of what was. Many of us try to cheat the system of this one, but let me save you some time: the next level comes only after the gap.
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You won’t be surprised to learn that Rosalie did walk away from her business. She left with less money or security than she wanted and deserved, and it took her a long time to grieve the goodbye the people and structure she’d built. She felt for months like she couldn’t breathe, vacillating between vigilance and aimlessness.
About a year later, Rosalie found herself just down the road from her family’s old farm, visiting a neighbor whose horse had stopped eating. She picked up some shifts with a large rural clinic, and she brightened to be back among the wide pastures of her youth. Her life was smaller now in many ways, with much more free time and fewer responsibilities. As she said goodbye to the old neighbor, promising to check in again in a few days, she realized how much liked the slower pace and deeper connection. She thought she would miss so much of what she’d left behind, but she was surprised to realize she didn’t. This life for now fit her better, and she was starting to think about what was next.
As she got into her car, she started to think about a mobile clinic, and what it might look like to be able to provide services to more of her old neighbors. She grabbed her notebook and started jotting down ideas. She promised herself she’d think about it more in a few days, letting the idea percolate. She knew there was no rush. She’d learned to tolerate slow change and the process of unfolding while she was in the gap.
But she smiled to notice the way her heart and her mind were open to possibilities. This wasn’t the life she’d planned out. For that she was grateful.
