Given my lull in travel, I've had the opportunity to establish a home base coffee shop. The building has become a bit of a personal sacred space- an office/incubator of ideas, a second home, and a haven of reliability. I always order the same drink from the same baristas, and I always hear the same type of music.
And yet, on one particular day, I walked into the strangeness of absolute silence. It was spooky... And uneasy... And then, just like that, the music started playing. It turned out I had just entered the space in between two songs.
Let me introduce you to my favorite word of the pandemic:
Liminality
Merriam-Webster describes the adjective "liminal" as:
"...A state, place, or condition of transition, as in 'the liminal zone between sleep and wakefulness.'”
My brother gifted me this term in 2020 when I was struggling to describe why I felt so uncomfortable. As Covid surged, I knew we all had been somewhere, and I knew we all were going somewhere else- but where exactly were we going? I was plagued with a sensation of floating around in a sea of utter nothingness.
It seemed to me we were trapped in the space between two songs.
Naming the "place" was an important step for me. It helped me put my feelings in a container of sorts. Although the environment felt foreign, I realized I actually had been there before:
Every time I had waited for a medical test result...
Every time I had applied for a new job...
Given there was no way (as far as I was aware) to bend time and immediately pull myself out of the situation, I realized I'd have to change my relationship with what I affectionately labeled the Great Pause. I took the opportunity to slow down and reflect on where humans had been, how we had survived challenges in the past, and what was mentally needed to get through a global pandemic. I began writing my show "Ingrid."
As I sit in my coffee shop, pondering the future of the country, the world, and (far less importantly) my tech contracts, I'm aware that my feet are, in fact, touching the wooden floor.
We're not floating away; we're just in the space in between.
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