Liminality Has a Name Now. It Still Doesn't Make the In-Between Easy.

Two weeks back I learnt a new term from the church theological summit – liminality. One of the scholars presented a paper and used the word "liminal." I had to check the word up cos it is totally new to me. Maybe I can use it to impress people one day. Maybe… now? Anyone impressed already?

"Liminality" is not a "religious" word. It is simply the state of being on a threshold, i.e. the space between "what was" and "what's to be." The "in-between." Derived from the Latin word limen, meaning "threshold," the term was originally coined by an anthropologist Arnold van Gennep and later expanded by Victor Turner.

Like me, you may not have heard of this word. But I am pretty sure we have all experienced it. Remember your late teens to early twenties years? That's liminality – when you are no longer a child but not yet an adult. Then for some of us, parenthood – specifically when your first child was born – could be a liminal period as well.

As the scholar went on presenting his paper, I must confess my mind drifted, intrigued by the word and thinking about the liminal periods in my life. Though retirement is still a while away, I imagine that may be another period of liminality? At least for some, if not all. The period when life seemed "unanchored" – no more daily routine of commuting, deciding where to lunch with your colleagues, maybe even missing the "thrill" of a deadline. (I am sure the third one does not apply to me.)

Because humans are naturally wired to hate ambiguity, the lack of structure can trigger anxiety, disorientation, and a sense of loss. We like to know what we are. Child or adult. Employed or retired. Married or single. Liminality refuses to give us that clarity. It asks us to sit in a category that does not exist yet, for as long as it takes, without a clear date on which it ends.

I think that is why the word stuck with me long after the scholar moved on to his next slide. Not because it described something exotic. Because it finally gave a name to something I had felt several times and never quite known what to call.

While my mind was busy wandering off from the scholar's paper, another idea I had picked up from church, years earlier, came back to me – the principle of entering and leaving. It is a simple one, and I have found it applies well beyond church: how you leave a job shapes how you arrive at the next one. How you leave a relationship shapes how you show up in the next one. How you close out a financial decision, good or bad, shapes how clearly you think about the next one.

I don't think this principle makes liminality any less ambiguous. The in-between is still the in-between – you are still neither what you were nor what you are becoming, and no amount of good departure planning changes that basic discomfort. What it does change, I think, is what you are carrying while you stand in it. There is a difference between standing in an unanchored space with your hands empty, and standing there still holding a mess you never quite cleaned up. Both are still unanchored. Only one of them is also heavy.

At work, I have always tried to leave a role with a successor who can actually succeed – someone briefed, someone ready, someone who is not going to be calling me three weeks after I have gone. I do this even while I am genuinely looking forward to whatever the new challenge is. It has never once made the handover comfortable. There is always a strange few days where I am neither fully in the old role nor fully in the new one, sitting in exactly the kind of threshold the scholar was describing. But I have noticed that when I leave that way, I enter the next thing without the low hum of guilt or unfinished business following me in. The ambiguity is still there. It is just not carrying extra weight.

I suspect the same is true outside of work. A relationship that ends with some honesty and care, even when it still hurts, leaves you standing in the in-between with a cleaner conscience than one that ends in silence or blame. A financial decision closed out properly – the mistake acknowledged, the lesson actually written down somewhere instead of just felt – leaves you freer to make the next decision on its own merits, rather than dragging the old one's baggage into it.

So maybe that is the one small thing within our control here. We cannot skip the threshold. We cannot make retirement, or any other liminal period, stop feeling unanchored just because we planned well for it. But we can pay attention to how we leave the room we are currently in, because that is the version of ourselves that walks into the next one. Retirement, when it eventually arrives for me, will be a leaving as much as it is an arriving – a leaving of the routines, the deadlines, the lunch decisions I complained about while I still had them. I would like to leave that room the same way I try to leave every other one. Tidy enough that whatever is unresolved in it stays behind, and does not follow me into the threshold.

I am not attempting to provide any solutions to this potentially confusing period that some of you may already be navigating. I don't think liminality is a problem to be solved so much as a threshold to be crossed, and crossed again, for as long as we are alive. But I hope that naming it, and holding it up to the light, gives some of you – especially those who have not yet arrived at that stage – something to think about before you get there.

What's stopping you from leaving your current room a little tidier, starting today?

👉 Hit reply and share your thoughts – I’d love to hear what’s resonating with you.

☕ If liminality gave you a word for something you've felt but never named, I'd call that a good use of a Sunday morning. If it did, you can consider buying L-Plate Retiree a coffee on Ko-fi.