There are times in life when we know that something is changing, but we cannot yet see what is coming next.
An old way of living no longer quite fits. A relationship has changed. The children have grown. Our work no longer feels like ours. Our body is moving through a transition. Something we once wanted no longer matters in the same way.
We may know that we cannot go back to how things were. But we don't yet know where we are going. These can be uncomfortable times.
We are often encouraged to move quickly through uncertainty. To make a decision. Find a new direction. Set a goal. Turn the ending into a beginning.
But there is another way of understanding these periods. We can think of them as thresholds.
A threshold is the place between one room and another. You have left one space, but you have not quite entered the next.
There can be something unsettling about standing there. The old is no longer available in quite the same way, while the new has not yet taken shape. And yet perhaps this space has something to teach us.
The discomfort of not knowing
We are not particularly comfortable with uncertainty. When we don't know what is happening, we often reach for an answer. We want to understand, decide, fix or move on.
Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. But some transitions cannot be hurried.
There may be a period when we need to let go of an old identity before we know what will replace it. A period of grieving something that we thought we had already outgrown. A period of feeling strangely untethered, even when nothing is obviously wrong.
We might find ourselves asking:
Who am I now?
What do I actually want?
What am I holding onto because it is familiar?
What has already ended, even if I haven't fully acknowledged it?
What is asking to change?
And sometimes there is no immediate answer.
Perhaps that is not failure.
Perhaps we are simply not finished becoming.
What happens at a threshold?
Across cultures, important transitions have often been marked in some way. Birth, adulthood, marriage, parenthood, death. Rituals and ceremonies gave people a way to acknowledge that they were leaving one stage of life and entering another.
But the space in between mattered too.
There was often a period of being neither quite who you were nor yet who you would become. I find this part of the idea of a rite of passage particularly interesting.
Because we tend to focus on arrival.
The baby is born.
The wedding takes place.
The new job begins.
The child leaves home.
We mark the event and then expect life to continue. But becoming often takes longer than the event itself. We may give birth in a day, but becoming a mother takes years.
Menopause may mark the end of one biological cycle, but understanding who we are in the years that follow can take much longer.
A relationship may end on a particular day, but the process of becoming someone outside that relationship may unfold slowly. The threshold gives us somewhere to be while that is happening.
We don't always need to know what comes next
There is a particular kind of pressure placed on women to keep things moving. To care. To adapt. To make sense of what is happening. To hold things together.
Maybe sometimes we need something different, maybe just to stop and ask ourselves:
What is true for me now? What has changed?
What am I no longer willing to carry? What needs my attention before I make another decision?
What would it feel like to give myself time?
A threshold is not necessarily a place of passivity.
Things can be happening beneath the surface even when we cannot yet see them.
A seed does not look like much while it is underground.
We don't need to force it open to prove that something is happening.
Perhaps there are seasons in our own lives when our task is not to push towards the next thing, but to listen more carefully.
To grieve what is ending. To notice what is becoming possible.
To allow ourselves to be uncertain. And to trust that not knowing is sometimes part of knowing.
Staying for a while
We don't have to romanticise difficult transitions. Some periods of uncertainty are painful. Some require practical action, support or professional help. And sometimes the next step really does need to be taken before we feel ready.
But there are also moments when the pressure to move forward can make it harder to hear ourselves.
Perhaps we can learn to recognise these moments.
To pause. To notice where we are standing. To give ourselves enough space for something new to take shape, rather than deciding too quickly what that new thing must be.
Because perhaps the wisdom of a threshold is not that it tells us where to go but calling us to stay present while we don't yet know.
I don't know what comes next. But I know that something has changed.
For now, perhaps that is enough.
Irida Hysenbelli — Rite of Passage Doula