The Liminal Space

Lately, I've been encountering the word liminality in blogs, articles, and social media posts.

It's a word I've been interested in for a long time. In fact, the territory it describes was part of what inspired The Space Between.

So perhaps it's time to revisit it.

The word liminal comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. The anthropologist Victor Turner described this territory as betwixt and between. No longer where we were, but not yet somewhere else.

There is something peculiar about a doorway.

Generally, we know whether we're going in or coming out.

But sometimes we find ourselves standing on a threshold, uncertain which direction we're facing.

And sometimes we stay there.

We talk about going through grief, moving through uncertainty, working through loss.

Even our language suggests that we're on our way somewhere.

But are we?

What if the threshold becomes a place where we live?

We wait for things to improve. For an answer. For something to replace what has disappeared.

And sometimes nothing does.

Life can place us in situations we didn't choose, cannot control, and may never be able to change.

But I've been wondering about something rather uncomfortable.

What happens when the circumstances that changed our lives begin to define everything we believe is still possible?

Perhaps, without quite realizing it, we begin to regard the present as a place where life cannot really happen.

Sometimes waiting becomes more than waiting. It becomes a way of postponing the decisions that living might require of us.

We tell ourselves we're waiting for circumstances to change. Are we also avoiding the question of what we're going to do if they don't?

There are people who live with extraordinary suffering and still experience curiosity, affection, gratitude, even joy. Their suffering hasn't necessarily diminished. Their circumstances haven't necessarily improved.

And yet their lives hold more than what has happened to them.

Their lives don't offer a standard the rest of us should meet. Nor do they suggest that grief, depression, or despair can be overcome by deciding to have a better attitude.

But they raise a question we may be reluctant to ask ourselves.

We can become so occupied with finding a way out of the space between that we scarcely notice how we are living within it.

Perhaps there is another question to ask.

Not only, How do I get through this?

But also, What might still be possible in the life I find myself living?

That's not always an easy question. There may be times when we cannot even imagine an answer.

We look backward at what we've lost.

Forward toward what we hope will come.

Inward, trying to understand what has happened to us.

But are those the only directions available?

What about outward?

Or upward?