Tag: liminality

I’m no builder. But I do understand that builders use scaffolding temporarily to help them reach hard-to-reach places and to keep themselves safe. They remove it when they don’t need it anymore, but they also wouldn’t dream of building something big and new without it.

As we near the end of the year, and this series on learning to love liminality, I want to land in a highly pragmatic place: all of us are in between things all the time, so we might as well learn to like it here!

Transitions are the norm, not the exception. In fact, we’re almost always navigating more than one at a time. In a recent study I commissioned with 1,219 midlife participants across Canada and the US, 40% reported being in the midst of more than one transition.

People in the messy middle of transition often describe feeling like they are trying to see through fog or swim through mud. Yuck. No wonder learning to love liminality feels like a tall order!

Two reminders I find helpful at this stage:

Satisfaction is a function of expectations, right?

So when it comes to loving liminality — a threshold between two seasons — one helpful first step is setting our expectations realistically.