Betwixt & Between- on the threshold

I am in a threshold space at the moment. I am closing down one way of being but am not yet in the other — nor will I really be for awhile, as the other place is an emerging one without clear boundaries. This isn’t a comfortable place to be, although it’s exciting. Terrifying. And exciting.

For twelve years, I’ve worked in a position at the local university. For twelve years, I’ve parked in the same place, walked up the same stairs, met with (mainly) the same people, and shepherded programs and information through an annual cycle that has its own rhythm. That rhythm has become so ingrained in me that it felt naturally occurring, like the weather, though of course work cycles are concocted by us and can at any moment disintegrate, as we all saw in 2020.

I decided to leave because I need to remember who I am beyond this particular rhythm. I want to create my own rhythm. To mix in and out of the pulsations of other organizations and individuals and their rhythms. In starting my own business, which is dedicated to helping organizations with their communications and programming, I am asking to be let in to their dance, to learn the shuffle of their foxtrot, and the way a foot drags just so on their jitterbug. I want to be reminded that many other ways of dancing exist.

Just yesterday, I was in a meeting with a woman whose job is in substance abuse prevention in another part of the state. As she talked about the problems in her community with meth and heroin and of the 10- and 11-year olds vaping THC, I was yanked out of the sleepwalking that can occur when anyone is in a job too long. Part of my brain was focused on the purpose of the meeting to figure out how to align possible services with her needs, but part of my brain was very much imagining the lives of people in the town. The lives of those affected by drug use. The perspectives of users, police, teachers, parents, business owners, all of whom have watched a town’s population decline.

It’s a world away. And yet it’s a relatively drive from here. The granddaughter of Iowa farmers from a town even smaller than this one, it’s happenstance that I’m not there, or they’re not here. It’s easy to forget this, to not see it. Working in one place too long makes us grow blinders. We forget to look beyond the daily calendar that can feel like a barrier against the pleasures of life but that also serves as a form of protection and distraction.

Since declaring that I was leaving my job to set off on my own, many people have told me that I’m brave. Sometimes they say it with an undertone of awe and envy, other times with a tone that suggests I’m a fool. Either way, I mainly know that I need to be more awake, more naked. Keep stripping the layers away in order to be more me is what I’m after, and a job is often layers of protective coating, of blinders and safety that permit us from evolving.

Any big life event — leaving a job, having children, divorce, losing a loved one, moving — necessarily throws us into the threshold space, that place of discomfort where you’re neither here nor there. It’s a place where, try as you might, you cannot force yourself out of, you simply have to be in it. (As my favorite childhood story about a bear hunt goes, you’ve gotta go through it.)

One of the best descriptions of the threshold comes from Irish poet-philosopher John O’Donohue:

Then when the grip of some long-enduring winter mentality begins to loosen, we find ourselves vulnerable to a flourish of possibility and we are suddenly negotiating the challenge of a threshold.

At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it? A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.

The threshold space is synonymous with ‘liminal,’ a word that I first heard from a friend who is an architect to describe the state I was in. It was the early 2000s, my kids were tiny, my marriage was crumbling, our mortgage was out of reach, I had no work. Little by little I was being forced into the betwixt-and-between. While the word has since been coopted by many other disciplines, it has long been utilized by architects. It derives from the Latin limen, which literally means to be on a threshold. That place is understandably exciting and challenging for those who think about the dynamics of space because it is neither inside or outside a building; it is either the entree into one physical space or the departure from the other. It is rife with possibilities, as any transition is.

Architecturally, there are abundant examples of this liminal space that show how it can be ripe for new and different ways of being. So often in current U.S. buildings, we are either in or out. There’s the world, then there’s a door we walk through and we’re immediately inside our home or office or store. We have little patience, or so our buildings suggest, to be neither here nor there. And yet in many parts of the world, this is a dynamic, intermediary space that blends the internal and external. When I was in France a few years ago, Bella and I stayed in an apartment in Montparnasse that had an arched entrance from the street that led through a little tunnel and into a lovely small courtyard. The entryways of multiple buildings were available from that space, which had a few trees and some benches and was convivial, in the truest sense of that term.

A piece on the architectural blog (no author is given) says,

“Threshold spaces are spatial arrangements of an individual’s mental need of acclimating to some random circumstance while moving towards an alternate encounter. It is where the physical-visual combination of the space abandoned, and the space to be entered is accomplished.”

It provides as examples of American threshold spaces the front stoops of brownstones in large cities and the wide front porches in the south. Another would be hidden courtyards in New Orleans, a city built on French aesthetics.

Largely, though, we are a culture that eschews this space and yet longs for it. We want to belong, to connect, and yet we have built so many barriers against it and then wonder why. This is true of our buildings just as it is true of our emotional spaces—so much so that we deem someone brave when she chooses to enter liminal space. So many of us avoid it until we’re thrust into it. But the more we choose to hang out here, the more practiced we become in just how rich of a place it is.

Right now, as I pack up my office and make lists about all the things I need to do for my new venture—set up an LLC, call contacts, keep improving this website—I can become paralyzed with fear. I feel like some character in an ancient tale who freezes up, unable to walk through the archway to the next world. When this happens (or, truthfully, when I notice it happening, which can take more than a moment!) I try to remember that I want to hang out on the front stoop, I long to be in that Paris courtyard. I am excited to just wait here with a cup of tea, curious about who might pass by and what rhythms will emerge. Hello, I’m here! I’m ready! Heart and soul, open for business!