Why Transitions Are Hard

in liminal space
between moments and seasons
potential is born

This time of year is a transitional time. It is a liminal space. School break. Many people take holiday vacation. It’s an in-between space.

Transitions are hard. When one thing is ending, and the next thing is not quite yet beginning, options can seem both endless and limited.

The liminal space can feel too brief to catch a breath. Not quite long enough to catch up on what you missed and to fully rest and recover, yet also feeling so long that you don’t know what to do with yourself.

The unstructured nature of a break can feel like a prison of freedom, a place where the committee of doubts and indecision gathers for its meetings.

Life is full of liminal spaces. They creep up in the cycle of the year, like now. They are a feature of the daily cycle: the time before sunset or after sunrise, between meetings and appointments, between dinner and bedtime.

They arise in our life cycle moments. Between graduation and the next thing. Between getting married and having kids. Between jobs. Between being separated and divorced.

If you think about it, all of life is lived in the liminal space between birth and death.

We are always in a transition.

And somehow that doesn’t make them easier. The emptiness of the liminal space can be terrifying. Paralyzing.

This is why we tend to over schedule ourselves and over work ourselves. It’s why we like to have the next job lined up before we leave the current job. And why my real estate clients are reluctant to sell before they’ve lined up their next home.

It’s why we scroll our phone while waiting in line at the supermarket or on hold on the phone.

And it’s why people you speak with at a conference or at a bar tend to scan the room with one eye while also speaking with you — looking for their next mark before wrapping up the current conversation.

The liminal space can feel unbearably empty.

But if we can embrace it, if we can lean into it, if we can sit in it, we might find that the emptiness gives rise to potential and possibility.

In the emptiness, we can receive new direction and destinations that previously were not on our radar.

In the cycle of the seasons, winter is that empty space. It’s the liminal space, the void from which life is birthed.

It may be cold, dark, and uncomfortable, but it also offers a wellspring of opportunity — if we are willing to sit in it.