“…wherever you are is called Here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger.” – from Lost by David Whyte
It’s an in-between space. A threshold.
While liminality often comes with a sense of urgency toward the new, a rush forward to escape the anxiety and awkwardness of no man’s land, it doesn’t have to be that way.
The opportunity of a liminal space is to occupy it as expansively as you can. If you are no longer back there and not yet over there you are still somewhere, a place called here.
During a time of intense creation, when our work was still forming and it’s impact as yet unknown, a few of us once said, “Someday we’re going to look back on this as the good old days.”
We were prematurely nostalgic for our experience precisely because we were in the midst of becoming rather than arriving, of curiosity rather than completion.
As long as there is some mystery, the unknown retains its hold on us. In doing so, it fires our imagination with all sorts of possibilities. A liminal space is a “not knowing” space, a reminder that we are always becoming.
DAVID BERRY is the author of “A More Daring Life: Finding Voice at the Crossroads of Change” and the founder of RULE13 Learning. He speaks and writes about the complexity of leading in a changing world.
