Mind the Gap
Those of you who have spent time in London and ridden the Underground (subway) there, you are familiar with some of the Britishisms that one encounters. If you are on the street, you are familiar with the “Look Right” or “Look Left” designations on the curbs that are intended to remind pedestrians that road traffic travels in the opposite direction than what is familiar to most people who live in right-hand drive countries (163 countries have right-hand drive and 76 countries – mostly ex-British Colonies- use left-hand drive). I actually know a guy who once made the mistake of not looking right when he was supposed to and stepped off a curb in London and paid the price with six month of rehab for the various broken bones he incurred from the accident that ensued. Well, the other sign you see all the time on the Underground platforms is “Mind the Gap”. All tourists have known this since the phrase was introduced in the Underground in 1968. They not only read it on the platform edge, but also hear it announced in particularly British accented English and it reminds people that there is somewhere between a 3 inch and eighteen inch gap that exists between the train platform and the train itself. I can’t say for sure how many people have been felled over the years by not minding the gap and getting a foot stuck therein or have tripped onto the train or platform for lack of mindfulness, but there must have been enough to make this warning a priority relative to all the other risks one might encounter in a London Underground station.
Gaps are perilous things in life. I wrote my first book a decade ago and did it the old fashioned way. I sent it out to various publishers under the letterhead of my title as a Clinical Professor of Finance at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. The very first one to receive it, John Wiley & Sons, a 215-year-old academic publisher, agreed to publish the book and sent me a retainer royalty check along with orders to get to work so that it would be ready by the following Fall’s publishing cycle. I doubt that sort of publishing business happens all that often any more…at least not the part about the upfront royalty. I had illusions about what working with a publisher would be like, expecting collaboration on many levels. What I got was a rather distant and detached process where the only two things they really cared about was the title and the cover art. What happened in between the pages seemed of little interest to them. I suppose I might be flattered by all the presumption of trust that I would write something meaningful, but I found it all a bit random.
Titling was all about high-value searchable topics. The book was about the looming pension crisis in the world. Their research had shown that lots of people wanted more information about “unfunded pension liabilities” and that was a catchphrase that they wanted explicitly in the title. I wanted to call the book “You Can’t Build Your Walls High Enough” and they sort of shook their head. I had taken their money, so I felt obligated to play the game by their rules. I used my walls title as a chapter title and then went with a more generic title of “Global Pension Crisis”. They challenged me on the global part, but I put my foot down, explaining that it was, indeed, a global crisis and that the economics and finance were nothing if not global these days. Little did I know that the nationalism trends of the last five years made me less and less right about where interest probably was headed. But the big give was the subtitle. I agreed to add Global Pension Crisis: Unfunded Liabilities and How We Can Fill the Gap. That was my global generic title with their searchable subtitle with a dollop of solution at the end suggesting that I would help the reader mind the gap.
Gap filling is a noble cause and it implies that you are working hard to pull both ends of the rope towards the middle to get things tied off. The expression “Falling through the cracks” is always a scary concept. A crack is a particularly heinous form of gap. Its a place where you are said to risk getting your ass caught in it. The nuance of getting stranded in a very difficult or uncomfortable state of affairs is not lost on someone who sits on an old sofa where the springs are worn and the cushions separate. The humor in that turn of phrase is, of course, the juxtapositioning of the sofa crack with the crack of your ass itself. Ass cracks are right up their with farts in the world of sophomoric humor. Santa gets elves stuck in the crack of his ass and the big woman in church in front of you is forever getting her skirt stuck in the crack of her ass when she stands up. But a crack is worse than a simple gap because while you can fall through it, you are more likely to get stuck in it. A gap is all about falling down into it to a place where you cannot recover easily. Go into a gap and perhaps never reemerge, but rather gone forever.
There is a benign version of a gap, as in a gap year, which is a sabbatical year often taken before or after attending college, but also sometimes taken after working long enough to need a rest or at least a temporary change. Sabbaticals are always seen as a bit of a reward and are considered refreshing and restorative. I don’t think I’ve ever asked for or been offered a gap year, but it sure does sound nice and enticing, as a pleasant way to spend some time contemplating the universe. But even beneath the surface, I would suggest that the working world looks with suspicion, for the most part, at gaps and gap years. A gap in your resume has never been thought of as a good thing, no matter what. It is just something to be explained or rationalized, so once again, the best career advice is to mind the gap.
There are probably a good many places on this earth that I would prefer not to go. For instance, I know that I am not a fan of high altitude. I like reading about and looking at pictures of high altitude locations, but the combined lack of oxygen and the low pressure environment do more to scare me and make me convinced that its not for me, more than anything else. I’m technically a certified (PADI) scuba diver and I have gone down to about 150 feet below sea level (not so far for professional divers, but 20 feet beyond the recommended limit for amateurs like me – and yes, I forgot and went 20 feet deeper than I should have). That was exciting in the day, but I have no need or interest to do that again. There are other places that are undesirable for other reasons, like Northern Manitoba Province, where the winter cold and the black fly season leave little room for enjoyment in between.
But the scariest place I know is the Darien Gap, that portion of Panama and Colombia that is a vast watershed jungle at the point where South America meets Central America. It has been a mysterious place for centuries, thwarting attempts to “bridge the gap”, as they say, via a connection between the northern stretch of the Pan American Highway and its southern cousin that rises along the Andean mountains along the Western Coast of that continent. There may be more primitive places on earth, but not too many.
These days, the Darien Gap is getting more news time due to the number of immigrants that are crossing the treacherous territory where not only is tropical nature your enemy, but so are both five native tribes in the remote area and an increasing number of bandidos and pirates. There are supposedly as many as 600 people with children crossing the Darien Gap each day with more and more incidents. Economic conditions in Venezuela seem to be the biggest contributor.
How strange is it that mankind, in all its years on this earth, has not figured out how to bridge the social, economic and physical gaps that nature has placed before us. Mind the gap.