Deep Dive: Not yet

You know the place you're in when you're not quite one thing and not yet another.

Liminal.

The doorway that’s the end of something and the not-yet-beginning-of-something-new.

In 1909, anthropologist Arnold van Gennep studied rites of passage across dozens of cultures. Initiations, marriages, mourning rituals, and coming-of-age ceremonies. He found the same three-phase structure in all of them.

Separation | Liminal period | Incorporation.

Every culture had built a middle phase.

Van Gennep noticed that cultures didn't rush this phase. The in-between was treated as sacred rather than something to get through as quickly as possible.

I have lost that instinct. Onward. Upward. What’s next…

William Bridges, a psychologist who spent decades studying life transitions said there's a difference between change, the external event, and transition, the internal process that follows it.

Change can happen the second a decision is made or an event happens. But transition takes longer.

He found that the transition, if people were patient with it, is where psychological change actually happens. When you rush to fill the space immediately or resolve the uncertainty as fast as possible then you arrive at the new chapter still carrying the old patterns.

It's not surprising we rush to fill the space that’s been opened. Sitting in the open can feel terrifying and vulnerable.

But Victor Turner, who built on van Gennep's work, described liminal periods as generative and full of potential energy.

He believed the loosening of old structures is precisely what makes new ones possible.

I'm not going to tell you the in-between is secretly wonderful. Sometimes it's just hard. Sometimes it just takes longer than I wish it would.

But the threshold is still a place. You're allowed to stand in it for a while.

Until next time,

Live your light.