Hi there,
Ready or not, we are here again. When I lived in New York City, fall meant I could open my windows again and enjoy the weeks before the radiators in my pre-war building creaked back on.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that. The feeling that shows up every time something ends and something else hasn’t quite started yet.
Merriam-Webster defines transition two ways. The first is well known: “a change or shift from one state, subject, place, etc. to another.” The second is “something that links one state, subject, place, etc. to another — a connecting part or piece.”
We tend to only hear the first definition — transition as rupture, as before-and-after. What I want to talk about today is the second one: transition as the connective tissue, the thing that holds the before and the after together so neither one falls away.
BETWIX AND BETWEEN
There’s a term anthropologists use for this in-between state: liminality, from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. Arnold van Gennep (French ethnographer and folklorist) coined it when studying rites of passage; Victor Turner (Scottish cultural anthropologist) expanded it. Turner’s description of what it means to be in a liminal state has stayed with me since I first read it:
“Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention.”
Betwixt and between.
You are not confused, you are not behind, you are not failing to adjust — you are in liminality.
I used to think of transition as a state I was either in or out of. Now I know that being alive means always being somewhere inside it.
I LEARNED THIS FROM TODDLERS…
I actually learned this lesson in the most unlikely classroom: the Barnard Toddler Center, where my kids went as, well, toddlers. Tovah Klein and the late Pat Shimm — who co-founded the program back in 1973 — built an entire philosophy around this idea: that separation and transition are not obstacles to a child’s development, they are the development, and it’s ongoing.
I thought I was there to learn how to get my toddler to stop crying at drop-off, but I was actually learning how to handle my own life. We never stop doing this. We are never finished with separation and transition — we just get better, or worse, at noticing when we’re in it.
THIS SUMMER, AND THIS FALL
This past summer, my kids were on vacation. I was not. Every week the schedule reshuffled itself, with no school pickup, no predictable rhythm, just a loose, sunny chaos that was fun and also a little stressful. I kept trying to build structure around a season that isn’t built for structure, and kept feeling slightly behind my own life.
And now, fall. I love the sweater weather, the sense of everyone snapping back into their own orbit. School already started, and there’s real relief in returning to our routine, but it comes, as it always does, with a little sadness: the kids are around less. I am, once again, on the other side of a separation I once coached my toddlers through (or, let’s be honest, that Tovah and Pat once coached me through).
Last week I was driving with my daughter while she took over the music with her own playlist — she’s fifteen now, and it shows. Out of nowhere, my eyes filled, thinking about her at college, which isn’t happening for three more years. I was grieving a separation I hadn’t even lived through yet.
CONNECTING THE PAST TO THE PRESENT
I think what was actually happening in my car wasn’t sadness about the future, it was my mind doing the thing minds do in transition: reaching backward and forward at the same time, trying to hold her at five, at eighteen and right there next to me, all at once.
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” — Kierkegaard
We are always doing both — always the connecting piece, Merriam-Webster’s second definition, linking who we were to who we’re becoming.
WHAT I’VE LEARNED TO DO WITH THIS
As a mother, an entrepreneur, and someone who has restructured her own life more than once, here’s what going through this has taught me so far:
We are never not in transition. There is no finished, settled, arrived version of a life. There’s just the next threshold, and the one after that. I learned to accept it as the baseline condition of being alive, not as a problem to solve, and that made it less overwhelming.
I stopped dreading each transition as the scary unknown, and started accepting it as the bridge and connection I need to move forward.
So whether you’re in the middle of something enormous right now, or just feeling that low-grade September disorientation that comes from the end of summer, my only real advice is this: notice that you’re in it. Breathe through it. Let it be a necessary and ordinary part of the process rather than a detour from your real life. If you get good at it, you can even welcome it (I’m not there yet!). That acknowledgment alone that this is a transition, and transitions are simply what living is made of, is what gets me through it.
We are always betwixt and between. We are always a moving bridge. That’s not the interruption of the story. That’s the story.
Sending love,
Patricia