I’ve had that feeling in the pit of my stomach lately, the one that’s part excitement, part sheer terror. Exactly like what you feel as your car clicky-clacks its way up the first hill on a roller coaster. The sense of anticipation that something is going to happen very soon and anxiety over what exactly that might be. The restless feeling as you draw closer to the top because you are sick wondering when the slow, steady climb is going to end, and you just want to feel the exhilaration of the fall and the momentum that will carry you through the rest of the ride. But there you are, still click, click, clicking closer and closer to the top … knowing the drop is inevitable but unable to see exactly when it will come.
This is what I call the “in-between.”
Others of a more scholarly nature call it “liminality” (coming from the Greek word for threshold – limnos).
“Between-ness is a defining characteristic of liminal. Limbo is another. Liminal is neither here nor there but exists between one moment and the next, poised in that pause where what’s passing hasn’t yet become what’s becoming. Liminal is a magical time, a dangerous time, fraught with possibility…and peril.” – Karen Marie Moning, Faefever.
William Bridges has written extensively on the subject of transitions and is the go-to guy for expert information about all things liminal. According to his book (aptly titled Transitions), there are three phases comprising the internal process we go through after a major life change: 1. the ending, 2. the “neutral zone” and 3. the new beginning.
It is during the “neutral zone” that we go off into the wilderness to try to make sense of it all; to regroup and rebuild. While for many people this leads to heightened intuition, personal insight and growth, and almost “spiritual” awakenings, others try to grab hold of something – anything – to free themselves from the ambiguity of the in-between.
According to Bridges, “One of the difficulties of being in transition in the modern world is that we have lost our appreciation for this gap in the continuity of existence. For us, ’emptiness’ represents only the absence of something…[so] we try to find ways of replacing these missing elements as quickly as possible.”
However, as Moning had her heroine point out in the earlier quote, this is a magical time full of possibilities. When taken in that light, the liminal is a lot like the thought experiment made famous by Erwin Schrödinger (and The Big Bang Theory) – it isn’t until we open the box that we know whether the cat is dead or alive. So in many ways, during this in-between time (in my personal case) I both get my dream job and move to my dream city. I can have it all. So why then are we all so consumed with opening the box?
I think it’s because even though this is a time of infinite possibilities. A time to reinvent ourselves. A time of creativity. It is also a purgatory of potential. Because no matter how great and wonderful potential and possibilities are, they are just dreams, ghostly images of a future we could have, that exist only until we cement something into reality.
So while anything is possible in the in-between, it is up to us to use this time to figure out what it is we want to make real.
Coffeeshop Cubicle 