First of all, Merry Christmas everyone, and Happy Hanukkah.  I hope you all had a holiday brimming with love and laughter and memories.  We are now in the midst of one of my favorite times of year – the no man’s land between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.  As the days bleed into one another, I regularly stay in my pajamas until 5pm or later, read entire books, and binge watch at least one full season of some smart show – or at least some enticing show.  I forget what day it is, care little about the tick of the clock, and let my mind, spirit, and body fully relax.  I certainly hope you all have some chance to do the same.

 Now for my usual left turn.  When I was an undergraduate, I was obsessed with war literature – in particular, the literature of the American Civil War.  One idea about war that captured my attention so fully was the idea that war is, essentially and without exception, what we would call a liminal experience. The word liminality is derived from the Latin word limen, meaning “threshold,” and liminal experiences represent the thresholds of our lives: we are fundamentally transformed by them.  Women and men who experience war, for example, cross over from who they were before the war, to who they become after.  Childbirth is a liminal experience – so is the death of a spouse or a terminal cancer diagnosis.  If I asked you, you could likely pinpoint liminal experiences in your own life and those of your loved ones – they are those pivotal moments by which we map our very existence, where we will always define ourselves as “before” or “after.”

While liminal experiences tend to be massive in scope and scale and catapult us into new chapters of our lives, I am also profoundly fascinated by the less obvious liminal spaces that we often overlook. They are, quite literally, “spaces between,” and our days are flush with them – however small, or however brief.  There is second-hand tick at midnight when each day turns into the next, the breath a child takes after she hits her head but before she screams, the moment after we hit our brakes before we skid into the bumper of the car in front of us, the days after we know a relationship is over before we tell our partner how we feel, or the heartbeats after a lover proposes marriage – and waits for the answer. 

Part of the reason I’ve grown to love the days following Christmas and leading up to New Year’s Eve is that I see them as liminal – as a space between.  The chaos of the holiday we’ve been anticipating for so long is over, but the next year has not yet arrived.  We are promised a new beginning – a fresh start, but first, we have to exist in this space between. 

Truth be told, I used to find myself unsettled, agitated, or even unglued each year as I waited for New Year’s Eve to arrive.  It’s not that I had fantastic plans for a night out, or even that I was looking forward to what often feels like the arbitrary turning of the calendar over to track the next 365 days.  Honestly, I was irritated by the sheer fact that I had to exist, mired in my thoughts, in this liminal space.  In some primal way, I understood that this was a time to reflect – to acknowledge the year that had passed and consider what the future might hold, and I didn’t want to do it.  I wanted to get on with it – drop the ball, turn the page, sing Auld Lang Syne and all that jazz.

What changed? I can’t be sure, but I started getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.  As a habit, throughout the year, I began to regularly push myself to look at where I had been, what I was doing wrong, what I could do better, where I wanted to go, and how I could get there.  I asked myself the hard questions, and I wrote down the answers.  I realized how transformative it was to be brutally honest with myself, and I marveled at how holding myself to that standard cracked open other pathways in my life and in my relationships.  Where I used to shy away or flat out avoid them, I began to cherish the hours or days when I was given the gift of time and space to reflect.  Slowly, I fell in love with these moments – the spaces between.

It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the most important things I do during these days of reflection is to do absolutely nothing at all.  I sleep, I daydream, I watch television, I read.  I allow myself to be idle, and I try not to feel guilty about my self-indulgence.  It is in these idle moments (and I realize, of course, that the opportunity to be idle is a precious gift) that I most clearly see where I’ve been and where I want to go.

I have a ridiculous story from today.  It involves a dead car battery, me getting on the wrong CTA line, a dead phone, and between two and four miles trekked around Chicago in bitter, sub-zero temperatures.  It’s ludicrous, and if you think I have my life together, this story will prove you wrong.  I promise I’ll share it, but for now, it’s time for me to turn on my television, pile on the blankets, and watch the tenth episode of season one of Outlander – a series I began the day after Christmas. (Yes that’s more than ten hours of television in three days).  My brain will be happily residing in 18^th century Scotland for the next hour, and that’s a space I’m perfectly happy to be in.

 

Until next time…