How Do We Find Ourselves in The Space Between?

There comes a moment — sometimes quietly, sometimes with force — when something in our lives ends. A role, a relationship, a community, a routine, even an identity we’ve worn for years.

Whether we welcomed the ending or resisted it with every fiber, what disappears leaves behind a shape we used to inhabit: a familiar structure that once gave us purpose, meaning, connection, or at the very least, predictability.

And when that falls away, we find ourselves in the space between.

It isn’t quite the ending — the ending has already happened. But it isn’t the new beginning either — that hasn’t arrived.

It’s the emotional shoreline after leaving one island but before spotting the next.

This space between often arrives in the wake of something impactful:

• a major transition

• a project that once absorbed us

• a role that defined our days

• a loss that shakes our orientation

• a change we never asked for

• or even a joyful shift that leaves us strangely hollow once the celebration fades

Sometimes we enter this space between with hope and readiness. More often we enter with anger, disappointment, confusion, hurt, fatigue — a swirl of emotional sediment rising from the bottom.

Jung called this kind of transition a “night sea journey” — a passage through darkness where meaning sinks beneath the surface and asks to be rediscovered.

And so here we are…

Floating.

Searching.

Asking all the familiar questions:

• What comes next?

• How do I fill this sudden void?

• Why do I keep rehearsing the past?

• Why am I tired of my own story?

• Where did my motivation go?

• My creativity?

• My spark?

Sometimes the catalyst is massive. Sometimes it’s something small — finishing an artwork and experiencing the subtle letdown that follows completion, or waking up one day to realize the well of inspiration you always counted on has quietly run dry.

We don’t choose the space between; it chooses us.

But there is beauty — and possibility — in this space.

Paulo Coelho captures the emotional weight of endings with extraordinary clarity:

“When the chapter closes, the page turns quietly, yet the weight of its words lingers…” “Every ending leaves behind a story still breathing within you.”

This, to me, is the truth at the heart of the space between: An ending is never just closure.

Poetically, psychologically, even spiritually, an ending is both a resolution and an opening.

It’s the moment when one shape completes itself just enough for the next to begin forming — though not yet visible. Not yet nameable. Not yet ours.

• So the the space between is not a failure.

• It is not evidence that we are lost.

• It is the quiet, necessary terrain between who we were and who we are becoming.

In this series, I want to explore that space — the strange pause, the unmarked territory, the fertile uncertainty — and the practices that help us stay creative, grounded, and curious while we’re there.

If you find yourself in the space between, consider this the beginning of the conversation.

You’re not alone in the space.

And you’re not stuck — you’re simply in that tender moment before the next shape reveals itself.