LIFE AS LIMINAL CONSTANT
The sunset used to be beautiful.
That’s before it was always sunset time.
Stuck in a zone that’s not still here but not quite gone,
life in in-between spaces becomes
not a passing event but a way of being.
No longer involved in the joys and activities
of the day one felt so meaningful, now bathed
in just enough light to perpetually to be a reminder
of what is all but gone, the essence one is about to lose.
There are no transitions, completions, or chances for moving on
when your sunset becomes a constant.
The only variables in your world
are shifting things that remind you of the eternal sunset.
So close but never any nearer to night,
that time of promised rest and rejuvenation.
Just dark enough to sense a mere inkling
of what the full of night must feel like
but still bright enough to remind one
of the pleasures of the day that are over now.
A melancholy anxiety pervades the soul.
A constant yearning for a completion in both directions,
a yearning invoked either for a return to the joys of the bygone day
or a realization of the cool transformation of anticipated night.
I would say no, eternal sunsets are not beautiful, they are hellish limbos,
places where you can’t let go nor grasp anew,
They dangle before you everything you were
in a day about over and gone
while teasing with a relief of transition
that never quite comes.
They remind you of what you no longer have
while previewing what you want but will remain out of reach.
In a life path a person takes, circumstances can collide
and life may become an eternal sunset.
Someone briefly glimpsing this experience from the outside
wouldn’t realize the hell that was ever unfolding for the person stuck there.
Someone from the outside would think it odd
if this person they saw was depressed, anxious, sad, or grief-stricken.
How could somebody with that experience be in such a dismal state?
They would assume a neurosis, an unbalanced nature,
a wrong way of thinking thus feeling. They would say to themselves,
“Now here is a person who gets to enjoy a beautiful sunset
and yet the pathologies they exhibit are inexplicable!
If only they would apply themselves to this straight-forward
methodology of mine, they would soon be quite all right!”
Someone from the outside wouldn’t understand
that living a liminal life is a life forever caught
within a space of transition,
a threshold between two distinctively different points
signaling the end of one and the beginning of another.
These places may externalize as physical spaces
but most often are emotional experiences,
they occur during periods of uncertainty and major life changes,
events like a divorce or breakup, a death of a loved one,
moving to a new city, starting a new career.
All of these create liminality in our mind,
signaling the imbalance of the life we had before now being over
while a new life must be about to begin.
Liminality is the unease and apprehension we feel during this transition.
Liminal spaces in the real world are harder to define and often only hint
at the full state of being trapped emotionally or mentally in between – think of
an airport terminal concourse abandoned in the middle of the night,
or a ghost mall on Monday morning where the majority of shops
have gone out of business and few if any customers walk about,
think of a deserted floor of a fully equipped office building with empty cubicles
and conference rooms and break rooms right after a company lays off all the workers,
think of a silent apartment complex evacuated after an earthquake
where no one can return to their homes and possessions
because it’s unknown if the structure is safe,
think of a twenty-story staircase flooded halfway up with water,
think of fine dining china ready and resting on a table
of a luxury ocean liner that sank to the bottom of the sea.
These are in between spaces, not meant for anyone to stay in very long,
hopelessly unable in their odd configuration to be either or,
an in between place – the middle ground, a transition space.
Most if not all of these spaces are not planned, they happen
as a result of chance, circumstance, uncanny context,
and intersections of morbid synchronicity and crosswise intent.
Circumstances in life can relegate a person
to an emotional or mental liminal space
and usually a person’s stay in such a zone
is brief or if longer at least progressing.
This is space at once both familiar and strange
with nostalgia for places you’ve never been or a time
you’ve never known except in your wishes, dreams, or delusions.
Many of these places are inhabited with out-of-context elements and artifacts
void of present relevance but were once so meaningful to us,
like the souvenir Hawaiian lei from a long-ago honeymoon
still showcased on the mantle
on the day divorce proceedings are initiated,
or hearing from a stranger a unique phrase or word combination
only used privately by lovers who now no longer speak to each other,
or hearing in passing the common surname
of a person who broke up a relationship
now that the relationship is ending.
If one is determined to get to the bottom of such a place, plumb its meaning,
find one’s truth within it, then one can easily get caught
in intense emotional dilemma-loops that go on forever,
endless mazes of in-between words and in between mental places
all evoking the same feelings that repeatedly sting and burn
over something long gone in one sense but never gone in another.
Like a cliched horror movie trope, you instinctively panic,
wanting out, and when you try to escape you find
your attempt drops you into liminal backrooms,
those unstable internal energy zones where one is stuck in between oneself
while endlessly searching for a way out in a place that forever recedes,
a place where searching only expands
the sameness of obsessive reference that surrounds.
Anxiety mixes with panic and futility, something is not right,
the whole process is empty, waiting while churning
to fulfill its heralded but ignored purpose.
What if every space in a person’s life,
internal and external, became a liminal space?
What if one’s world, one’s life became liminal,
stuck in the limbo of the in between,
occupying a position at or on both sides of a boundary of unknown depth,
a threshold where one must remain if they ever try to cross?
Some say every liminal space has the same ultimate point – to find your way out,
find a way to complete the transition, a way to affect a phase state shift
to move beyond the stasis of not being fully one thing but can’t be fully the other.
But some emotional liminal spaces are self-reinforcing,
by their very design they ensure no way to move on.
The imperative becomes being liminal as a way of being,
the only way to authenticity.
Holding steady in between is seen as making a bold stand
in the alchemical fire of life’s situational polar opposites
and asserting from the conflagration some brighter realization of Self.
The Self that burns brighter is the Self
that consumes more of itself for the sake of its meaning.
All ideas need to be transcended, so says the sage who then laughs
at the absurdity of another idea he transcends while proving his point.
Is there a reason why a person would fall into a liminal life
as the truthful nexus of their meaningful path?
What if a person’s main thing was deeply wanting
to know and be something meaningful,
how could one ever guarantee oneself
that anything they found was meaningful,
how anything was true?
What if a person’s innate drive to find this truth, to acquire this meaning
was so intense they couldn’t stop testing the answers they found,
testing to make certain they were true?
How much testing would certainty demand?
How do you ever know when you found
the meaning that’s truly meaningful?
If it means that much to find it then
it needs the highest level of verification.
To have connection to something truly meaningful,
how far would one go, how much would one endure
to secure such a thing as genuine?
What else could be more meaningful than meaning’s pursuit?
And if such an all-fulfilling connection and meaning truly exists,
are there levels to that connection, to that meaning?
Are some things more meaningful than others?
What does life on Earth show us?
And if some things are more meaningful than others,
then there must be levels to connection, to meaning,
and just how far must one go
to achieve the most connection
to the most meaningful thing?
And why would anyone ever stop short of this?
What would that final state be? Do we ego-avoid the challenge by claiming
such a thing is nothing but a vapid or unreachable ideal?
And even if it is an unreachable ideal, even so, why in spite of this
do we instinctively yearn in that direction?
Why do we grow towards such a thing
if it’s so ridiculous or pathological to do so?
If we choose 2 out of 10 on a scale of 1 to 10,
we selected something more than 1 for a reason,
for 2 must be more in the direction of personal truth and meaning for us.
In everything we do we are selecting (judging) what is better or best for us,
given the available options, which is another way of saying
we are always selecting what is more meaningful and true for us.
Why did we choose to sit in this chair in the waiting room rather than that other chair?
We couldn’t help but go for the one that was better for us, however we decided that.
Connecting to what is truer and more meaningful for us happens all the time
as if it’s baked into a destiny dna we can’t help but pursue.
And as some go ever deeper into their search
for what’s true and meaningful,
the journey and the things found become ever more special to them
until at the deepest levels the things they pursue and find become sacred to them.
And then they lock on with all their being, for what is meaningful to them
is what is sacred to them, and what is sacred to them
is the way to their concept of the divine.
But chasing the divine in a polarized world
on the wavering border of order and chaos
can lead one to continue along a path
others would know better not to attempt,
not with their mundane sensibilities and reduced expectations.
What if your pursuit of your personal sacred got you emotionally caught
in liminal backrooms where, like the eternal sunset,
the vitality of your emotional life was over but the connection
you sought was forever about to happen, but apparently never would?
What would happen if one’s search for personal truth and meaning
became a perpetual liminal space? The truth was there but
the light of its day dimming under the weight of worldly debasement.
The meaning was there but only possible in a new day of the Phoenix
resurrected after surviving the purging and transfiguration
possible in the depths of night.
What if this fall into endless limbo was precipitated
by a traumatic life event that ripped
the linchpins of one’s core reality into chaos?
The basis of what one thought was known
about the things most true and meaningful to them
were suddenly blasted apart, shown to be illusions
projected onto inflated attachments
and the future once anticipated as a result of this meaning wasn’t to be?
One's truth and meaning was still true,
only the means to move towards it was found horribly in error.
To go beyond such an event one would have to slip into night.
To validate by rebirth the original truth and meaning one thought they had
would require finding a way to hang onto a fading day.
But a world that says go forward would mean giving up
on the blasted truth and meaning one felt was already validated.
To go back would not be possible
since the passage of time has moved on.
Left in between, the eternal sunset of one’s soul
would remain in place and its tension would need to be suffered.
It’s so beautiful to those who can move through it.
For the rest, its beauty is a constant reminder of
what can’t be endured yet can’t be avoided.
In the backrooms of destiny
the full search for truth and meaning
leads to a self-reinforcing liminal constant of
wounded heart and overwhelmed mind.
Neither heart nor mind can solve it.
Mind cannot understand it in its sacred un-Earthly fullness.
Heart cannot cope with its expression here with its debased Earthly demands.
It remains, apparently forever, in an in between place,
a soul problem beyond reach, even for the soul.
