Embracing the Liminal Space

I had a high school English teacher who once spent an entire class trying to explain liminality, using the door leading into the classroom as his prop—I didn’t get it. In retrospect, I guess I hadn’t yet walked through enough doors in life to understand.

Twenty years on, I’m starting to get a handle on the idea. So, Mr. Dlugosch, here we go again . . .

what does it mean, though?

Horror movies use a slick trick to keep people unsettled. The characters are always stuck in between places—hallways (The Shining), roads (Halloween), stairs (The Exorcist)—and you might think it’s the bad guys that make it scary, but actually that in-between space itself does it to us.

Dial back the psychosis, and you’ve got a working definition of liminal space: the in-between, the transitional stages of life, the threshold dividing here (our current state) from there (where we want to be). And generally people get uncomfortable lingering there, just like you wouldn’t stand in the middle of the crosswalk. Because we want to get on with it, land on the other side. Our culture has hardwired this desire into us. Unfortunately, a few of these wires have come loose.

alright kid, now you’re an adult

Traditionally, liminal space refers to cultural rites of passage. The moment in the middle: no longer a boy, not yet a man. Not too long ago, most societies contained longstanding rites of passage—coming of age ceremonies, vision quests, marriage rituals—but with the broad cultural decline of these rites over the last one-hundred years, the concept of liminality has expanded to include the most basic transitions within society—graduation, marriage, kids, divorce—things that aren’t necessarily agreed upon, and may not even apply to most individuals.

There’s much to lament about the downfall of traditional rites of passage (even if some were problematic in their own right). In many ways, we’ve been cast adrift, as the social maps showing at least one clear path through life have been lost to shifting values and the mechanics of cultural evolution.

It’s tempting to say we must go back and reestablish the rites of passage. But when a storm comes through and levels the town, you’ve got to clear the debris entirely before you can build it back up. So, let’s finish the demolition . . . because there’s never been one side or the other.

it’s all transition, baby

Imagine life is a hallway. Behind these doors we expect comfortable rooms—rooms of final destinations, rooms of goals achieved, rooms of satisfaction—but when we open the doors to these rooms, what if they’re actually just more hallways? And inside those doors yet more hallways, on and on, ad infinitum.

The fallacy of rites of passage is believing the hallway ever ends. Because the end of one passage is also the beginning of the next passage. Any certainty footed on reaching the other side of transition will be eventually undermined by the transition following after that. What is life itself but a liminal space between birth and death? Who knows? Maybe death doesn’t even have finality? (That’s another topic . . . though I’ve experienced one “sign from beyond” that I have no logical explanation for—Inquire within.)

As they say, the only constant is change. Each instant is fundamentally transitional: somewhere between day and night, one season to the next, year to year. If no man is an island, than neither is a moment, inextricable from the context of what came before and what will come next. To pin down a man, a moment, an idea to a single point kills the journey we’re all on.

don’t put me in a box

Our culture is not known for its ability to understand nuance, let alone holding conflicting viewpoints in consideration at the same time. We want certainty. To achieve it, we increasingly slap binary labels on everything from politics (left/right) to class (rich/poor) to personal taste (good/bad). These definitions, meant to help us understand the world, do exactly the opposite. The word ‘define’ itself comes from the Latin de fine, meaning bring to an end—or to kill. To define something is to kill it.

Society expects that we be one thing. Black or white, gay or straight, man or woman . . . I ask why it has to be either/or? Why is mixed race identity, bisexual attraction, and transgender existence such a fucking threat? Because people are terrified of liminal space.

I’ll put this plainly: definitions serve to kill, but life persists.

living in the gray

I’m happy to exist in the gray area. I say that now, but the truth is I struggled for a long time to actually do this and mean it. It’s comforting to put up those walls, to build yourself a little fortress of impenetrable belief. My therapist put it this way: we’re made of water and we’re always trying to figure out what glass to pour ourselves into, but sometimes water’s meant to spill and flow. Take Bruce Lee’s advice . . .

Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless. Like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

Water doesn’t know where it’s going. It just goes. We don’t know where we’re going. We never have (even when we’ve convinced ourselves otherwise). And that’s a good thing. It’s the key to living in the present. As Lao Tzu wrote:

If you are depressed you are living in the past. 
If you are anxious you are living in the future. 
If you are at peace you are living in the present.

Embracing liminal space is about living in the present. Not here nor there, but now. We might call it gray area between black and white, but if you know anything about light, that’s where all the color is. Rainbows might seem like a horror flick to some, but not me.

Shine on.

-Martin

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