Leaning into Liminality
The spaces between things aren’t always comfortable. But part of life. Can we learn to accept and lean into them.
Photo by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash
On a warm afternoon in early June, my husband and I checked into a hotel in Puglia, for the start of our first week alone together since our son was born. I’d been dreaming about the trip ever since the freezing January day I booked it. The sixteenth-century ex-farmhouse, set amidst olive groves and a ten minute drive from the sea, would be perfect for five days of rest and relaxation.
But when I arrived in our pristine stone-walled room, silent aside from the hum of cicadas through the open windows, I felt unmoored: there was no tidying or cooking to be done, no laptop or to-do list to settle down with. And I missed my son. What would we even do with ourselves for five whole days?
The following morning, I stood on the beach, bare feet sunk into sand, looking out across the blue Adriatic, towards the soft line where it met the sky. I never want to leave, I thought to myself. I want to read and sleep and daydream and feel the breeze and sun against my skin and listen to the rhythm of waves against the shore.
I waded into the water. It was cold, at least by my standards. Once my ankles and calves were submerged, I paused, postponing the inevitable discomfort of shifting the rest of my body from its surrounds of warm air to chilly water. Within seconds of plunging in, I’d acclimatized. I swam and swam, enjoying the freedom of being almost alone in this vast body of delicious, cool water, buoyed by its gentle waves.
All too soon, it was time to head off to the ancient city of Matera, for our final two nights. We were staying in a cave room, carved into the city’s edge. Across the gorge and visible from our tiny terrace was a landscape of barren hills and limestone outcrops. I missed the whitewashed walls and terracotta pots filled with bright pink flowers from our previous hotel.
By the time we sat down to dinner, the setting sun had transformed the landscape from forbidding to magical. And with a glass of wine and a bowl of pasta in front of me, there was nowhere else I wanted to be.
These moments of transition reminded me of how sitting in the space between one thing and the next can feel awkward. On holiday, they were brief – a few seconds here, an hour or two there. Back home, I sense that similar discomfort as I finish a phone call to a friend and approach my computer to write you this letter. I procrastinate, convincing myself I need a fifth cup of tea before I can start writing. And yet, as with the sea, once I’m in, I’m.
At points in our lives, we’ll also find ourselves in wider spaces of liminality, ones that might last weeks, months, even years. Times when one thing is over – a relationship, a job, a home - but we’ve not yet fully landed in the next.
I’ve had plenty. Such as the months after I completed treatment for breast cancer and felt so lost, discharged from chemotherapy and radiotherapy’s rhythm, but not yet having found a new way of living in the wake of this experience. Or during the initial months of motherhood where it felt like I’d arrived in a foreign country where I could neither speak nor understand a word.
My innate response, when caught in these interstitial spaces, is that they’re an inconvenience. I wish them away, inwardly complaining when they last any length of time.
Yet they’re necessary spaces in which we must land, for a while, before we settle onto new ground. Spaces that never last forever, even though sometimes we fear they will. And spaces whose awkwardness and discomfort are no doubt softened if we’re able to meet them with curiosity and presence rather than resistance, accepting them them as part of life’s natural order, rather than an anomaly.
They’re mirrored in the pulse of life around us. In yesterday’s summer solstice, where the sun reached its highest point in the sky and appeared to take a pause before beginning its six-month journey towards the lowest point. In the spaces of dusk and dawn, which hover between day and night, night and day. And, if you look closely enough, you can sense them in your breath: a subtle pause at the peak of every inhalation and the completion of every exhalation, occurring some twenty thousand times a day.
Love,
Annabel x
PS. For those for you who attend my 7.15am Thursday morning yoga class at Triyoga (details below), the class will run on 29 June and 6 July, then take a summer break (as I have no childcare!), resuming from 31 August. I’ll continue to teach as usual on Sundays at 5.15pm.
Love your writing, I feel like I’m reading a novel :)
A lovely piece Annabel, I certainly relate to the discomfort but also sometimes juiciness of the in-between where there is lots of potential (alongside uncertainty). Yasmin Chopin recently wrote a piece on liminal space in relation to place/buildings that I am sure you would find interesting (especially with your architecture background!) xx