Somewhere in my travels through books and words I fell upon a two-word combination that’s stuck in my head ever since: liminal spaces. It’s a fancy way of saying the space (or time) between something. A quick glance at my dictionary tells me that it comes from the latin word for “threshold.”
As someone who’s lived through more transitions than I can count, whether that’s between addresses or between seasons or between phases of life, I guess it makes sense that those words would be a little sticky. So when I noticed several people around me mentioning the quality of these days between Christmas and New Years as a sort of liminal space, it made (and still makes) perfect sense to me. I feel it, too, this sort of letting out the breath held during Advent, just before the deep inbreath of New Years and setting back to work in a new year, perhaps with a new mindset and the cleansing feeling of having started anew. Yet, in these days between, there’s a heaviness of the year past, a time when things slow down and quiet and we’re given space to reflect –perhaps moreso, since this is not only the end of a year, but of a decade.
In a Midwestern winter, after a just-barely white Christmas and a few inches of fresh snow in this week between, the outside reflects the inside. Everything stills in the snow, and the bright frigid mornings seem to add to that clean, silent sense of space and openness. Here, there is space to let the weight of a year past settle into memory, and space to walk into the hope of a new year.
Some describe this week between as a letdown, a time when time slows, a time of fatigue and sleeping in and greyness –and I feel that, too. But I wonder whether that reaction is one of our culture, a culture which thrives on noise and busy-ness and fullness. Like nature abhors a vacuum, we resist these times of silent space. We don’t want to make room for silence, let alone have it handed to us in the form of a week with no agenda, with no parties to attend or tasks to accomplish.
But I really think this week-between is a gift. It’s a gift like the silence of snowfall: something that, as adults who see snow and think only of ice scrapers and shovels and snowblowers –who only see the work to be done to clear the way out– we forget. We forget the joy of playing in the snow, of lying on the ground in the middle of a fresh snow angel, listening. We forget when we focus on the past and the future and miss what’s going on in the moment.
Perhaps that’s the lesson of liminal spaces. Liminal spaces in nature are usually times of unusual beauty: sunrise, sunset, rainbows, the clouds building before a thunderstorm. They’re things we miss when we’re not paying attention. So, in this time-between, enjoy the silence. Pay attention, make room, and relearn the gift of the present.
Photo credit: “frosted sunrise” by c thomasson is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
