I have had a long and sometimes uncomfortable relationship with liminal space. For many years, I have tried to explain my fascination with the numinous, spine-tingling opportunities that await us when we step over the threshold from certainty and security into the unknown, where we experience the pause between what has passed and what's about to come – the spaces in between; the transitional moments and mystical places that we stumble across in our lives.
In recent times, the nearest that many people have come to recognising liminality was in March 2020, when the world was rocked by the global COVID pandemic. With our health under threat, lifestyles curtailed and indelibly altered, and our futures unclear, we found ourselves living in uncertain times. Few of us were immune to the unsettling feeling of being in transition. This feeling of limbo and being on the brink of something unknown is a glimpse of liminality – the spaces and times where the known ceases to exist, where transformation takes place, the place in between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
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Yet, whilst the pandemic served to show people how unnerving liminal space can be, how discombobulating and disconcerting, downright terrifying even, liminal space can also be a place where insight, creativity and inspiration are found. By accepting liminality into our lives, it has the potential to produce a sense of awe in us. In an age where so much is known, defined and explained, the feeling we derive from liminal spaces and times can shake up our complacency and enchant us if we let them.
So, how do you know when you are in a liminal space? Here are 8 ways to spot it:
- You feel you are on the cusp of something major but you're not sure what it is
- You feel adrift; like you don't belong, don't fit in with your current lifestyle
- You are searching for your life purpose but as yet have not found it
- You feel stuck
- You feel drawn to certain places, often remote landscapes or thin places, where you feel a sense of awe, that you are in the presence of something greater than yourself
- You want change but fear leaving the known, what's comfortable, and perhaps fearing that you will alienate those you love if you take the leap
- You spend much of your time looking back with nostalgia or forward to future goals rather than being in the present
- You feel yourself to be in a creative void; lacking inspiration and insight
Liminality is all around us in our daily lives; it affects our decision-making, our inspiration and our creativity. Exploring it can help us to better understand ourselves and our place in the universe; and why welcoming change and liminality into our lives, rather than actively avoiding it, can be a good thing for us all. I'm in no doubt that to more fully know ourselves and to be in harmony with the world around us, we need to lose ourselves in liminal space whenever possible.
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