field notes from liminal spaces

I've been listening to the audiobook of Tiny Experiments: How To Live Freely In A Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. This is such a charming book in which Anne-Laure encourages us to navigate our lives not in a linear way but to look at our activities and meanderings and explorations as tiny experiments.

One of the things Anne-Laure says in an early chapter is to set out on a journey of self-anthropology — an exploration of our own selves and lives — and maintain field notes on our observations about ourselves.

This has given me the inspiration to return to blogging because writing is the way I primarily begin to gain clarity on what and how I think. Rather than maintain field notes throughout the day, I'd prefer to come back here for an end-of-day reflection.

Blogging was the way I came to writing in the first place, many, many years ago. I had a lovely little circle of blogger friends, and it wasn't an activity pursued with the intention of garnering the most likes or comments or riling or pleasing the crowd.

Many of us led simple, middle-class lives. We simply wrote what occurred to us, and we encouraged each other to keep writing. No one asked us to blog. We wrote because we wanted to.

We didn't write to be read, partly because that was something we could take for granted in the early days when writing or creating content online didn't feel like shouting into the void. We wrote because we had something to say. We commented on what others wrote because those topics resonated with us in some way, touched us deeply, and made us want to contribute our own two cents.

Writing was not a means to an end. It was an activity of joy unto itself.

All that has gone, and writing has morphed into something else altogether along the way. I'm not romanticizing the past or moaning the transformation the world has undergone in the past couple of decades.

But I definitely feel unmoored in these wildly uncertain times. Instead of letting my days slip past in anxiety over the future, I'm more determined than ever to live more in the present, show up to do my work, and contribute positively to society and have a lasting and encouraging impact on the people I cross paths with offline or online.

field notes from liminal spaces is simply an endeavour in that direction.

Why liminal spaces? Liminal spaces are in-between states, that space that exists between one thing coming to an end and another thing beginning. For instance, when we switch from one job to another, when we await the arrival of our baby, when we wait for to finish high school and enter university, and so on.

In her book, Anne-Laure talks about how we try to rush through these liminal spaces so that we won't have to flounder in the uncertainty of what's next.

I think we're forever in a liminal space of one kind or the other. Caught in our daily routines, we tend to forget that the rug can be pulled from under us any moment. The pandemic taught us this. And we forgot those lessons all too quickly.

These wild times we find ourselves in are yet another reminder of how uncertain everything has always been and will always be, how tomorrow is never guaranteed, and how the present moment is all we've always had even when we deluded ourselves into believing otherwise.

One way I've been trying to focus on the present moment is by literally taking each day, one at a time.

“Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

I don't know if the master said this or if someone else interpreted these words to mean that we can look at each day as a mini-life in itself, whole unto itself, and it can be free of the burden of the past as well as of anxiety over the future. This imagery somehow seems to resonate with me.

Every time my mind wanders to the past or the future in a way that is not helpful, I remind myself that this moment, this day is all that exists.

Let me experience this instant fully. That's really all that is required of me right now. In fact, that is really all I'm capable of right now.

If you're reading this, I dearly hope you too will find some solace in these words and find the courage to step into the present moment and make some field notes about these liminal spaces we find ourselves in.