Beauty and terror

“Let everything happen to you
 Beauty and terror
 Just keep going
 No feeling is final” 

Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m thinking about these words from Rilke as I navigate through this liminal space. One of those in-between places. The intermission between the end of one chapter and before the next chapter begins. The confusion before the clarity. I’ve been waylaid from the path I was on, uncertain where I’ll land next. 

My instinctual reaction was to resist the change. I refused to relinquish control of how my life should unfold. I held onto outdated ideas and beliefs about what I should have achieved by now and what I should accomplish next. I buried myself with work, noise and distractions. Anything to drown out my inner knowing, the quiet voice whispering in the undercurrent.

I played the role as if I had the script and knew my lines. And that's how I lost myself. 

My life was a performance of the person the world had told me to be. The more I resisted the change, the more I tried to force an outcome, the longer I remained stuck and stagnant. By refusing to accept that the life I was living no longer fit the person I was, the longer I held myself captive to a narrative that felt like a mask.

We only get one chance at this life thing. There are no dress rehearsals, no do-overs. It’s difficult to concede that the narrow perspective of life we were conditioned to think would provide us with safety, security, and success, falls short. We follow outdated maps that lead to dead ends. We arrive, only to feel more lost than ever before. Letting go of who you once were and an identity you’ve outgrown can feel like defeat—and, to on-lookers, astonishingly like failure.

Suddenly, the fundamental structures that once held you together begins to falter. You outgrow the role you play, the identity you assume, and the story you tell yourself—and nothing new comes to replace them.

But what if the discomfort of change wasn’t a cataclysmic failure, but a portal into new and exciting experience? What if the thing we perceive as a failure isn’t something to avoid, but an opportunity to do things differently?

Because, it turns out, getting sidetracked from the path I was on wasn’t evidence my life was falling apart. Or, that a crazy lady was living inside my head. I was being redirected from a path that wasn’t meant for me. Unfurling into a new and unfamiliar way of being. It wasn’t what I thought I wanted, but it turned out to be everything I didn’t know I needed.

The North Star, Polaris, isn’t a fixed point in space. And the same is true of our lives. What we want from life will evolve and shift as we grow, and are inevitably altered by the wider accelerated changes in the world around us.

And there’s always a reason to resist and stay within the comfortable confines we draw for ourselves. Following the pull of your inner guidance is a step into the unknown. You will wander and get lost so far from the path you were on, you will forget where it was you were going. It will demand you to excavate and expand in ways you never anticipated.

The liminal space I’ve been in for the past few years has been daunting to navigate. It’s the great unknown—a transformative place where nothing is written, nothing is guaranteed, and everything is possible. Rather than resist it, I’ve decided to embrace it. Despite what my ambition, drive or anxiety might have me believe, I’ve come to realize there’s nowhere else to be but here.

We’re impatient and want to hurry through the lulls and detours and go straight to the Good Part, in stories and in life. But maybe the transition period is the good part. Maybe, as Alan Watts put it, we miss the point the whole way along: to sing or to dance while the music was being played. Sometimes all we can do is surrender, and allow life to rearrange us into new and better ways. The rest, friend, is up to you.

I did the only sensible thing one can do when you find yourself at a crossroad in life: I jumped headfirst and heart wide open into the liminal abyss of possibilities. I wandered and got lost in the beauty and terror along the way. And I remind myself that no feeling is final. We forget this sometimes. We think growth is linear. But more often than not, we feels like chaos and confusion.

That’s what it’s like to move into new territory.

It’s not falling apart.

It’s becoming.