A step into liminality: where the certainty ends, and a future destination is not clear.

In June of this year, I consciously stepped into a liminal space.  Retirement does not seem at first blush to be liminal as it represents the end of a working career, one that is romanticized by popular culture as an end goal of doing all the right things.   You have arrived at the right place.   But that story never resonated with me.  It was just another narrative that our culture had constructed around us, perhaps cynically, to justify all the years and hours of commitment to an institution or an employer.  

Diving deeper took me to the role of identity and identity formation, realizing that for much of my adult project is one of identity construction, from insecure teenager to an allegedly competent adult.   Yet, in each on those stages, there were periods of leaving one certainty and periods of confusion until something more secure would fit my persona.   This logic assumes these transition periods are just that transitions.   I wonder, however, what happens if we turn that logic upside down.  The transitions are the norm, and the periods of certainty are fleeting and ephemeral.

This blog will look at that transitional space and we began that exploration with an actual journey to mark my retirement that I undertook walking the borderland between Wales and England.  A borderland is one such liminal space and on each side of the border there is identity formation; an attempt to be “Welsh” or be “English”.   Over the next 300 km I would cross the border at least 22 times, as I walked on my own liminal journey.  I hope you can join us.