Working in the Crease
At 25,000 feet, the air is thin and the silence inside the Herc is surgical. Other than final instructions clattering in their earpieces, there’s no talking. Just the steady hiss of oxygen masks and the click of final checks. Altimeters tapped. Packs secured. Eyes forward. Six men sit shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in Kevlar and purpose, hearts pounding beneath layers of discipline.
The red light glows. One beat. Two. Green.
The ramp drops open to a black void. Wind howls. Cold slices through the gear. One by one, they disappear into the dark, arms crossed tight, bodies arrow-straight, falling fast through the edge of the world.
Freefall is violent and holy.
Noise and stillness. Speed and suspension.
Just gravity, muscle memory, and the long countdown to chute deployment.
At the last possible moment—just above the threshold—canopies snap open. Bodies jolt. Silence returns. Now they’re low. They’re in. And they’re alone.
The LZ doesn’t match the briefing. Shadows are off. Structures shifted. Maybe they’re early. Maybe late. Doesn’t matter. The mission isn’t canceled. It’s just changed.
So they do what they were trained to do—
Scan. Adjust. Trust the man on your left. Trust your gut.
Land soft. Move fast. Make meaning in real time.
This is what Special Ops teams call the crease. It’s not just the battlefield. It’s the space around it. The gray zone between mission and morality, control and chaos. It's not safe, but it's real. And only those who can hold that tension without flinching belong there.
It is where plans end, and presence begins.
I’ve never worn the uniform, but I know that terrain. I’ve lived in it. We all have. Most just don’t have language for it.
The Crease is Reality
The crease is the threshold between binaries, between what was and what’s becoming, between certainty and surrender, between story and truth. In Special Ops, it’s a literal place. In life, it’s spiritual, relational, creative, existential. It’s where you feel tension—not as a sign that something’s wrong, but as proof that something real is trying to be born.
I grew up in a rigid, fundamentalist faith system where certainty was currency and doubt was sin. Every question had an answer. Every answer had a verse. For years, I confused obedience with truth and performance with love. But something in me refused to go away, something that could smell the staleness in absolute systems. A whisper that said, this isn’t the whole story.
That whisper grew louder every year. I would catch glimpses of it in books I wasn't supposed to read. I would feel it in moments of silence, when no one was watching, and I wasn’t performing. It came in flashes—a sermon that felt hollow, a prayer that felt like theater, a rule that didn’t align with love. I didn't know what to call it, but it was trying to save my life.
Finally, in April 2014, that feeling could no longer be contained. I had my first in a series of spiritual ruptures. It wasn’t a crisis of faith. It was a collapse of illusion. The scaffolding I had built around my identity—my theology, my success, my niceness—all of it began to buckle under the weight of something more honest.
It was disorienting. Lonely. Terrifying. But it was also liberating. Because in that unraveling, I met something I hadn’t encountered before: presence. The ability to sit in silence without having to explain it. The freedom to say, "I don't know" without shame. The clarity to feel tension and not immediately run from it or wrap it in scripture.
That hum of dissonance? That was the crease trying to introduce me to reality.
Tension is how you know you’ve found the crease.
We’ve been conditioned to see tension as danger. But it’s actually the doorway. Every creative breakthrough, every relational repair, every moment of spiritual clarity I’ve ever had was preceded by the same thing: discomfort. A steady hum of dissonance that said, “Pay attention. This isn’t just pain, it’s possibility.”
This feeling is the signal you’re standing at the edge of something real but hidden. The brain hates it. It wants resolve. It wants black-and-white, good-or-evil, yes-or-no. But the soul doesn’t evolve in binaries. It evolves in friction. In ambiguity. In the ache of not-knowing.
In the language of systems thinking, this crease is known as the edge of emergence. It’s the place between order and chaos, where nothing is stable and everything is possible. Complex systems don’t evolve by clinging to equilibrium; they evolve by flirting with breakdown. That’s where new patterns emerge, where self-organization kicks in, where intelligence becomes adaptive.
But only if you don’t flee the discomfort. Only if you can stay in the crease long enough for something new to take root.
The doors to the Crease
“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.”
― William Blake
Philosophical Door:
“Working in the crease” is fundamentally an ontological act, an engagement with being in its most raw and paradoxical form. The crease is not a destination but a condition: the narrow interstice between opposites like control and surrender, self and other, temporal and eternal. It’s the space that neither side fully owns, but both exert force upon. In philosophical terms, this is the terrain of dialectic and nonduality, where contradictions are not obstacles but engines of growth.
Instead of reducing complexity to find answers, the crease invites us to hold complexity without flinching. To stay in tension. Heidegger called this dwelling—an attuned presence to the mystery of Being itself. The crease is where that mystery pulses, unsettled but generative.
Psychological Door:
In psychology, particularly in Jungian and depth psychology, the crease is where the conscious self confronts the unconscious. It’s where shadow material surfaces—not to be exiled or intellectualized, but integrated. This is often a painful space: the zone of cognitive dissonance, identity deconstruction, trauma reckoning, and emotional exposure.
Working in the crease, then, is doing the inner work of re-patterning—tolerating uncertainty long enough to move from ego-protection to ego-transcendence. From a developmental psychology lens, it’s a rite of passage: you’re not who you were, but not yet who you're becoming. That in-between demands both courage and humility.
Spiritual Door:
Spiritually, the crease is sacred ground—liminal space where the veil thins between human and divine. In Christian mysticism, it’s the via negativa: the dark night, the silence between prayers, the wilderness between crucifixion and resurrection. In contemplative traditions more broadly, it’s the kenosis, the emptying out of the false self so that the deeper Self (or God, or Source) can emerge.
Working in the crease means consenting to be undone, letting go of spiritual certainty, moral superiority, or transcendence-as-escape. It’s not about enlightenment as a peak, but embodiment as a practice. This is where real liberation begins, not in fleeing the mess, but in finding meaning inside it.
Systemic / Social Application Door:
On a macro level, the crease shows up in collective consciousness too—in cultural upheaval, political polarization, organizational breakdowns. To work in the crease at scale means being a systems thinker who can hold competing truths without collapsing into cynicism or fanaticism. It means refusing easy binaries and cultivating dialogical space—where multiplicity is not flattened, but honored.
Doing business in the Crease
In business—especially in the realms of culture, innovation, and branding—working in the crease means operating in the messy, high-stakes tension between what a company says it is and what it actually does. It’s the space where leadership vision, employee reality, customer perception, and market forces all collide. And it’s exactly where the most potent, durable transformation happens, if you’re willing to stay there.
A few years ago, I worked with a well-established wealth management firm. They had hired me to help them articulate their message. Their website was filled with words like “integrity,” “transformation,” and “people-first.” But when I walked the halls, what I felt was fear. Performative positivity. Decision fatigue. Executives who talked about “alignment” but hadn’t been emotionally honest in years.
One afternoon, during a leadership offsite, I named it. I said, “You don’t have a brand problem. You have a truth problem.”
Silence. Some defensiveness. A few grateful nods. And then slowly, the room began to open. Stories came out. Resentments. Confessions. Long-held disconnections between what they believed and what they actually lived. That was the moment they stepped into the crease.
That was the moment they stopped thinking about their brand as an external thing and started becoming a brand. Because brand is a spiritual practice. It’s the art of aligning the internal and external. And that alignment always starts in the crease.
When you master the Crease, you become unseduceable.
You’re no longer swayed by easy answers, rigid ideologies, or the shiny illusions of certainty. You’ve seen too much. Felt too much. Sat too long in the tension to trust the binary game.
The crease doesn’t just change how you see the world—it changes how the world responds to you. You start moving with a different rhythm, one that’s deeper than noise, deeper than performance. That rhythm is power. But not coercive power. Not dominance. It’s generative power—rooted in presence, integrity, and soul.
And that makes you dangerous. Because systems built on control can’t manipulate someone who doesn’t need certainty to feel safe.
Your Invitation
If you’re feeling that hum—that tightness in your chest, that friction in your relationships, that voice inside whispering this isn’t quite it—don’t run. You’ve probably found the crease.
Here are three questions to help you get curious about the crease:
Where in your life do you feel unresolved tension?Not crisis. Just dissonance. That’s the crease. Don’t explain it away, explore it.
What would it look like to be curious instead of certain?Can you trade the comfort of clarity for the gift of growth?
Where are you demanding closure when life is offering emergence?Not every ending is meant to be tidy. Some are meant to open something sacred.
This is a really great piece of writing!