“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.” (William Blake)
On March 17, 2020, I was at the airport to pick up my daughter. The already liminal nature of the airport - a space of transition where we are neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’ - felt especially unsettling and strange as we made our way to the mostly deserted arrivals area. Over the following weeks and months, our lives ~ spatially, temporally, and experientially ~ were characterized by a sense of living in a time between ‘what was’ and ‘what is next’. And still now we are here in this shifting and disorienting liminal space.
Liminal, from the Latin word ‘limen’, meaning threshold, is a place of transition, of waiting and not knowing. The anthropologist Victor Turner described liminality as the quality of the times when people find themselves ‘betwixt and between’ more comfortable and recognizable states. Liminal experiences are, by their nature, unsettling, disruptive, and disorientating, and where we oscillate between the known and the unknown.
We recognize a liminal time as:
~ A forced and prolonged separation from normal ways of being and doing.
~ While a liminal experience involves a prolonged break from the familiar, it does not fully replace it; it is both disturbingly different and confusingly similar. Our usual activities ~ buying groceries, grabbing a coffee, walking down the sidewalk, going to work ~ feel both familiar and strange in the context of plexiglass, masks, physical distancing, and daily covid news briefings and case counts.
~ When a liminal experience comes to an end, we will have been transformed and changed in ways we may not yet fully understand.
Grief therapist, Katy Friedman Miller refers to liminal experiences as ‘thin places’ where we are not ‘who we once were, but not yet who we will be’.
We are collectively living in a liminal time as the pandemic continues on. We are also individually navigating our way through our own liminal experiences ~ job or career changes, relationships ending, relocating, or in the liminal space of mid-life. Some of us are living in layers upon layers of liminality.
Liminal times are frightening because it’s not apparent what’s happening. In this collective liminal time, our discomfort and disorientation can lead to a fight, flight, fawn, or freeze response. We have seen this throughout the pandemic – people caring and tending, arguing and lashing out, languishing, withdrawing, worrying, and feeling sad and exhausted.
In life design, we allow ourselves to sit for a time in a liminal space while navigating through career and other life transitions and changes. While liminal experiences are disruptive and unsettling, they are also potent opportunities for reflection, discovery, and transformation in the face of uncertainty and vulnerability. Basil King said, ‘Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid’. We go to liminal places throughout our lives, by choice and not, and maybe they are all practice for recognizing our mighty forces – time, patience, our friends and loved ones, creativity, movement, nature, our resilience and adaptability, humour, and in the words of Katy Friedman Miller, ‘the practice of letting ourselves go to whatever comes next.’
Please reach out if you’d like to learn more about navigating liminal times. I’m currently offering online private and semi-private life design sessions.
