This post is by guest author, Natasha Isenhour. This article has been edited and published with the author's permission. You should submit an article and share your views as a guest author by clicking here.

I wonder what the answer would be, if I chose ten thousand people at random and asked what was the busiest place they could think of. I wonder what the consensus might be. Would the majority say Wal-Mart? The subway? The local DMV? It is the week of April 15th, so perhaps the tax preparer would be the answer. I don’t know. But for me the busiest place I know can be very close to home.

Without close watch, there is a traffic jam here every five minutes. Arguments and conflicts abound. Discursiveness fills the space much of the time. It is never quiet. No space, no room to breathe. I am talking about the mind. The mind is the very center of our unique and precious self. The place we nurture the least and are the hardest on. And so I ask you, where are the “gaps?”

Pause for a moment and reflect on the last time you were truly touched by something. Think of a time that you were moved to tears or had chills from a passage in a score of music, from watching a dancer move her body so fluidly and intuitively she seemed to float across the stage or a huge orange full moon rising above the landscape turning night into day with its brilliance. How about when you looked at a painting and something reached in and took you by surprise? You couldn’t articulate it. It simply touched you. It is in those moments that all the noise, traffic and discursiveness stops . . . if only for a moment. Those are the “gaps” I am talking about.

As artists we often become a slave to productivity. We deny ourselves that spontaneity that brings to fruition our unique creative voice. Now think of the last time you were at the easel when you let yourself go. When you launched with an idea and simply made space for your intuitiveness to take over. I would then ask if it corresponded to the last time that you woke from your creative trance to be amazed at what you had done. That space in time between idea and stepping away is the “gap” that I am referring to. How often, then, does that have a chain reaction with someone else? So often that purity and honesty translates and becomes the thing that reaches in and catches someone else by surprise.

Think of what a gift it is when you are on the receiving end of a “gap.” Now think of how precious this gift of talent is that you can pass a “gap” along to someone else.