Allowing the gap
Allowing the gap is a building tip, and describes a practice that avoids a too tight arrangement. Butting each end/side up tight against the next, in hopes of achieving some minimalist perfect surface that hides its parts and form under an ideal finish…. —but which does not allow for the practical expansion and contraction of materials, causing the tight butted forms to buckle. The practical power of the compromise in leaving a gap, is in reducing the rhythmic strain from day to day, and season to season from affecting the structure so built.
Especially in lining a wonky old shed with plywood sheeting… —as I will be doing soon (once the seepage in the dam wall is dealt with).
In addition, if this is your to be-seen and lived-with surface, one will just highlight, reinforce and underline the wonkiness. But by allowing a gap, into darkness and shadow, the minutia of missed alignments are not as obvious to the eye. Mismatches and crookedness are more apparently in forcing closure.
If you use your mind as a world seer, as if in suspension, then perfection is no longer a necessary virtue, and need not surface the built environment with such determined tensions.
You’ll be fine, relax.
People feel it necessary to fill the gap… —to throw stuff into it, in a misguided attempt to world-build tightly… —butt up ideals against reality, but something must give when the humidity changes. Yelling won’t help.
Oh, the anxiety.
One practice that may help each and all of us at the edge of the gap, is to allow the gap, and not act on the feeling or urge to try and throw stuff into it. FIX IT. To, at least, look before we leap into action. We might allow the urge of “the should” its notice, and then “to should” our notice into contemplation, and not a rashly “must” or demand a “must-be” of absolute comittment.
Allowing the gap both allows both a view of the lack before us, and of oneself at the edge, and so the practice of allowing the gap will help de-escalate our anxiety.
This is what is meant by ataraxia in Pyrrhonisitic practice, when suspending judgement. When suspending the self, one suspends judgement. In making a judgement the self is no longer suspended.
This is the wisdom in avoiding rashness in belief, which makes one’s world-building abilities in selfbuilding dogmatic, rigid and chaos-prone… —right there at the edge where one might just step off into craziness, and dance with the unicorn conpiracies.
Thanks to Anthony Johnson and Ben Yardley for the advice given next to the brand new pencil sharpener.
Newer version at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/