An invitation to listen—and to reconsider what we have learned to overlook.
My English-language audiobook, The Distance Between: A Novel About the Observer, the System, and the Difficult Art of Seeing What Is Actually There, is now published and available on Spotify. Written by Joe Cozart and narrated using a digital voice credited as Digital Voice Joe Cozart, the unabridged edition runs approximately one hour and twenty-eight minutes. Open the audiobook on Spotify here.
There is a particular kind of distance that grows inside familiar surroundings. We can spend years within an organization, a profession, or a way of thinking and become increasingly fluent in its explanations while becoming less able to see what those explanations leave out. Experience teaches us where to look. It can also teach us where looking is unwelcome.
The Distance Between begins in that unsettled space between participation and perception. It explores the observer’s relationship with the system, the difficulty of maintaining an independent identity within established expectations, and the discipline required to notice what is actually happening before deciding what it means.
That discipline has a personal cost. When the explanation everyone accepts no longer accounts for what you observe, the disagreement rarely remains abstract. It enters conversations, relationships, and the private calculations through which people decide how much of their judgment they can afford to express. Silence may preserve belonging. Speaking may expose a difference that was easier to leave unnamed.
I am interested in the moment before that choice becomes visible: the hesitation at a desk, the sentence left unfinished, the recognition that the accepted account is orderly but incomplete. A system can continue functioning while becoming progressively harder to describe honestly. Its participants may recognize the discrepancy long before anyone finds language that permits it to be discussed.
A novel gives that condition room to breathe. It allows observation to remain unresolved long enough for the reader to experience the pressure of it. Certainty arrives quickly in public argument; understanding often develops more slowly. Sometimes the useful question is the one we have been hurrying past because answering it would disturb the arrangement of everything around it.
Yet distance does not confer wisdom automatically. The independent observer has assumptions, incentives, and blind spots too. Skepticism becomes another enclosure when it cannot examine itself. The difficult art is to remain open to evidence that unsettles our preferred interpretation, including the interpretation that we alone have understood what everyone else has missed.
That tension runs through my writing and through the work of GMJoe™ Consulting. Before a consequential decision can improve, someone must examine how the problem has been framed, which interests sustain that framing, and what disappears from view when one explanation becomes compulsory. A clearer description can change the range of choices available before anyone proposes a solution.
An audio edition offers another way into these questions. A sentence heard in motion can meet a listener differently from a sentence encountered on a page. The thought has company on a walk, during a drive, or in the quiet interval after the day’s demands have loosened their hold. I welcome the possibility that this book may reach someone at precisely such an interval.
The Distance Between is now ready for that listener. Listen on Spotify; Spotify will display the listening or purchase options available to your account and location. The English audiobook is also available directly through GMJoe.org.
If the questions behind the book intersect with a decision you are facing, GMJoe™ Consulting offers private written strategic engagements. The book introduces a way of seeing. An engagement brings that attention to the particular problem in front of you.
Information is common. Inference is scarce.
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Joe Cozart, GMJoe™, GMJoe™ Consulting