Liminality
Liminality: 15 May 2023
I haven’t been able to decide whether to represent my current state as liminal space or liminal time. Which is the threshold I’m experiencing?
If I think of the liminality as a threshold in space, then I am in a doorway between rooms, say. Or maybe in the narrow part of an hourglass: the past accumulating in drifts at the bottom, and gravity acting on the present moment to deposit the next swift future event through the bottleneck. But even that description—with past, present, and future—presumes the presence of the fourth dimension, time. If we consider all four dimensions, then we have the concept of spacetime. That, I believe, is what liminality is truly trying to describe.
Consider that hourglass again. Physics uses a similar concept in special and general relativity: the light cone, which depicts all the paths that a flash of light would take through spacetime, given its specific starting point. In an hourglass, grains of sand start in the top chamber and flow to bottom, marking the passage of time. In the light cone, time flows with similar causality, but without the force of gravity, and the light events starts at the bottleneck. All the possible pasts that led to this point are on the bottom, the middle marks the single point in time of the event/observer, and the top expands into all the possible futures.
Here's a beautiful poem (thank you, Leo) that draws the same picture another way—of past and present and fluttery future together.
“LIMEN
All day I’ve listened to the industry
of a single woodpecker, worrying the catalpa tree
just outside my window. Hard at his task,
his body is a hinge, a door knocker
to the cluttered house of memory in which
I can almost see my mother’s face.
She is there, again, beyond the tree,
its slender pods and heart-shaped leaves,
hanging wet sheets on the line—each one
a thin white screen between us. So insistent
is this woodpecker, I’m sure he must be
looking for something else—not simply
the beetles and grubs inside, but some other gift
the tree might hold. All day he’s been at work,
tireless, making the green hearts flutter.
”
I’m not explaining this well. The point is that my liminality is both a spatial and a time-derived state of existence. A specific series of past events can chart how I got to here. (You might be interested in the world line.) But from here there’s a multitude of possible futures. My threshold is not between two rooms, but between all the rooms that led to here and all the possible rooms that open from here. That’s what makes liminality so difficult. It’s not following a predetermined path; it’s discerning which door to try. In my case, a fair few have remained locked; several have shut; a couple flat-out slammed.
I’m stuck at the threshold in the hourglass.
One mistake I’ve made is to assume that this is a pause between working at my former job and working at whatever job is next. Like so many people before me, I have conflated what I do with who I am. This new threshold is bigger than that. Maybe I no longer get to (have to?) define myself by what I’m paid to do.
I need to make some money, sure, because let’s be honest, not working is not long-term sustainable. But what if I don’t begin with idealism, with a cause, with a mandate to right wrongs? Maybe I just have a job, and coming home is the meaningful part of the day. Because I don’t get many more years of my children living with me.
I’ve tried not to be too busy during this in-between time. Tried to focus on my health, my body, my spirit. It would be easy to power through a big to-do list, but as uncomfortable as this is, I don’t want to miss the magic of the awkward in-between. I’ve worked hard to maintain a very now attitude because the blank future what’s next? ramps up my anxiety.
My fear is there’s nothing next. That this is next.
Along with the fear there’s a large dollop of grief. I am grieving my younger selves, the selves fueled on hope and passion and ambition. I've been heartbroken too many times to recover the courage it takes to wager my days and my energy on a cause.
My whole life I've led with idealism. Here is a righteous cause, and I shall throw myself into it for the greater good! Here is a grave injustice and I shall give my all to see that it is righted! Here is a fellowship of conscience whom I will join to further the goals of equality and to create the beloved community!
Here, on this threshold, I feel none of it. And I deeply grieve the loss.
And yet. There is still an irksome internal questioner asking, “but what if there is more?” This is the Advent part of me. I have, in the past, loved the truth of expectant waiting. The hope in spite of all available data to the contrary; the joy in the face of grievous wrong; the light in the darkest of darknesses. But here in this unexpected expectancy, I am hopeless and bereft in a heartbreakingly unprecedented way.
I completely trust the expectant waiting in Advent; I completely trust that the Epiphany will be revealed. I’m also secretly sympathetic to Judas because this is not the Messiah that I wanted either. That is my perpetual Lenten grief and my undeserved Easter blessing. I am ridiculously trustful that what God has promised continues to be true: do not be afraid; all will be well.
I am a hot mess of contradictions.
Throughout these months, well-meaning friends have assured me that the next right thing is out there, and that in God’s good time I will know it. It’s not that I disagree, exactly, but when people say these things to shield themselves from my pain it’s hard for me to meet them there because I, in fact, am the one in pain. I’m such a private person anyway that the mere fact that you know about my awkward pain is already a steep hurdle for me. I know it hurts to see me hurt, but please don’t make me alleviate your discomfort in my predicament. I’m not expecting you to fix me.
But other people have met me square in the pain and, in so many words, told me to get over myself. This week a new friend cornered me at a church women’s gathering, put both hands on my shoulders, bored her eyes into mine daring me to look away, and said, in her own words and from her own experience, with occasional emphatic shaking: this sucks, and it will pass, they didn’t deserve you, you would have been miserable, and you’ll find the right next thing. She wasn’t even drinking! Clearly, she’s a keeper. You better believe I was drinking.
From Fr. Richard Rohr I’ve found some helpful thoughts on liminal space. He says, “The very vulnerability and openness of liminal space allows room for something genuinely new to happen. We are empty and receptive—blank tablets waiting for new words. Liminal space is where we are most teachable, often because we are most humbled.... Without standing on the threshold for much longer than we’re comfortable, we won’t be able to see beyond ourselves to the broader and more inclusive world that lies before us.”
I’m in such a bewildering time of meekness and doubt. I’m confronting challenge to my long-accepted understanding of myself and making way for a downhill slide from some peak I didn’t realize I’d crested. I have very little confidence that what I have to offer is even needed, much less important. And yet perversely, sometimes I still find myself wondering how I’d handle being interviewed about this threshold. Honestly, it’s humiliating.
Life is really doubling down on humility. Just in case I was getting comfortable on the threshold, or wallowing too deeply in my pity party, fragility has been on lurid display. Between last week and this I am witness to friends enduring cranial surgery, broken bone, hysterectomy, hip replacement, double mastectomy, and tragic untimely death, among other lesser blows. How can we be anything other than humble, unless possibly terrified, in the face of our brutal, beautiful, not-in-our-control lives?
So here I sit, at the threshold, in the event center of my light cone. I cannot predict which future will come into being. It seems it will be one that I cannot yet imagine, some genuinely new thing. That feels alternately exhilarating and debilitating.
Except that most days I wake up having slept well, and my first thoughts are: Oh! I don’t have to go to work today! Is it a yoga day? How much time do I get to be alone? What shall the family do together tonight?
Could there be a more right next thing than this?
Maybe. Maybe not.
