 the space between stories. So normally we operate, we human beings operate with a story that tells us who we are, the story of self, the story of the world, the story of what's real, of what's important and what isn't, of who's reliable, what consists of true knowledge, how to live a life, how to do it, how to be a man, how to be a woman, where we're coming from, where we're going, a whole story that makes sense of the world and one's own place in the world. Well, there comes a time in life when that story stops working. It's not necessarily a sudden event that the story stops working. It could be, but often it comes as a growing sense of futility or depression or it just doesn't make sense anymore, a feeling of alienation, a feeling of not belonging here, of nothing working. That's part of a breakdown process. Often then there will also be some sudden event that has been built up to through that growing alienation. The event could be a health crisis or a marital crisis or some other disruptive event or it could be something social and political too, that's happening. And it unravels what had seemed so real and so permanent and so unquestionable. So you enter then into what I call the space between stories in which you just don't even know who you are anymore. You don't know what's real anymore. The ways that you've navigated life don't work or they don't make sense and you have even a feeling of vertigo. There's different phases of the space between stories. Sometimes you might be terrified and want to crawl back into the womb, so to speak. Sometimes you might feel exhilarated and excited about what's on the other side of this. What is the new me and the new world that is going to arise from the ashes of the old? Sometimes you might feel both of those things at once. But that process of truly letting go and of entering into the unknowing is usually necessary in order to step into a truly new story. There has to be that plunge into uncertainty into the empty space. It's like a vacuum in which something new can arise and it's scary. A lot of times we'll try to prevent it from happening but we'll cling on to the shreds of the old story. But on the other side of it, usually it turns out that it wasn't as bad as we thought it was gonna be. The worst thing in the world turns out sometimes to have been a blessing. Now a new story is emerging based on the interbeing of the self that recognizes that our purpose is to serve life and beauty on earth, to contribute to the healing of the planet and the healing of society. But that has not yet gelled into our collective defining story. You don't hear presidents and pundits saying, this is what purpose of humanity is right now. And because of that, we also don't have institutions to hold us in that endeavor, to support us financially in that endeavor. You can still make the most money by contributing to the despoliation of the planet, not its healing. We've got to plant some trees. How much money are you gonna make from that compared to digging a lithium pit mine to make electric vehicle batteries? It's the pit mine where the most money is not in the wetlands restoration project. And that's because our society collectively does not value the latter, but only the former. Much as we might say otherwise, our institutionalized economic value system does not support as much the healing work that needs to happen. So we're lost ideologically lost and economically lost. And this is another aspect of the space between stories. And it culminates when we really, really admit to it, acknowledge that we're lost and stop thinking that we know how to do this. Then we'll have the humility for something new.