Each day this month, I am taking one painting (chosen from an art book I have) and writing a brief text about it in a little notebook. It’s been a great exercise so far, and I wanted to write a blog post about one of the paintings I chose this week: The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo.

I’ve seen this painting before and obviously am familiar with what it is depicting: the creation story.

When I looked at it earlier this week, however, I saw something different: the story of humankind.

“How so?” I hear you ask, shoveling popcorn eagerly into your mouth. Let me tell you.

I’ve been a little bit obsessed with futility and gaps for a while, and when I looked at this painting, that’s what I saw. I saw the story of humanity as trying to bridge divides – overcome gaps.

We had a gap caused by physical space, so we built and invented methods of transportation, all the way from the wheel to the train and the airplane.

We created spoken language as a way to bridge the divide between ourselves and other humans.

And we tried to bridge the gap of time by creating written language, which can transcend both time and space.

The divides we have been able to bridge are nothing short of astounding. But those bridges are still imperfect and incomplete.

Transportation methods are increasingly sophisticated, but they only work for people that have money for them; and language is amazingly effective, but still falls short frequently and cannot exactly re-create our experience.

It’s like we’ve built bridges from where we stand, and we’re within shouting distance; we’re reaching out, just like the two figures in the painting are reaching towards each other, but we can’t quite make it.

I love that human history shows how valiantly we have always tried to fully bridge those gaps, how much we have always reached towards each other. But this reminded me that maybe fully finishing those bridges shouldn’t be the goal, after all.

If we understand that we can never completely have the same experience as someone else, maybe we can stop trying to re-create it and instead focus on just listening. Listening instead of stubbornly insisting that X isn’t what we see. Listening instead of stepping on toes while trying to walk “in someone else’s shoes.” Listening instead of shouting that we can’t reach you.