A liminal moment is one in which you are in flux, in limbo.

You’re in the process of moving from one state of being to another, and although you’ve already left your previous state behind, you haven’t yet arrived in the new one.

The word “liminal” was originally reserved for rites of passage. The time between a student’s final lessons and the graduation ceremony that hearkens the next step in their life—that’s a liminal period.

During that period, where everything you’ve known has been pulled away, all of your comforting, familiar rituals and habits no longer relevant, your circle of friends, perhaps, changing around you, your time suddenly spent in different ways—you may experience disorientation. A dissolution of character, of self-identification.

We define ourselves, in part, by how we spend our time and energy. When all the trappings of one lifestyle are swapped out and when what replaces them is not some new collection of the same, but instead, nothing, a period of waiting—your new life, your new external identity hasn’t arrived yet—it’s possible to lose yourself in such moments. You’re facing countless unknowns without the support system you’ve long enjoyed, and without a complete understanding of your own behaviors and preferences that have, up until that moment, provided you with helpful reflexes and defaults.

I’ve experienced a decent amount of liminality over the past nine years. Moments where I wasn’t even sure what I was doing, or why, or how on earth I got to where I was in the first place. The pieces make sense in isolation, but the connections between them can blur when your predictable structure distorts and gets fuzzy around the edges.

These moments, though, can also be incredibly valuable if we allow them to be.

It’s terrifying to face the unknown, certainly. And it’s disconcerting as hell to face the unknown without any kind of tether to what has, until that moment, felt like firm ground.

But that very discombobulation can serve as an intermediary point to something even better than you could have imagined in your previous lifestyle incarnation.

Before you stepped off that cliff into the liminal void, you were limited by the context of your existing situation and circumstance. Liberated from the gravity of a full life, however, with all its expectations and momentum, you may find that there are other paths you never noticed before. Choices you might make that wouldn’t have made sense to your previous self, but which have a certain appeal to you as a less encumbered entity.

A recent state of liminality helped me dream up my next year-long adventure—a speaking tour undertaken while full-timing in a vintage motorhome—and several components of what’s now real, what has become tangible, were once unthinkable to me. Not because they didn’t make sense for who I am and who I was, but because they fell so far outside the realm of what I was considering feasible and desirable that they never popped up on my radar in the first place.

Much of the time, liminality is something that happens to us rather than an intentional state of being. We lose our job, we graduate, a long-term relationship changes shape, we move somewhere new, somewhere far from everything we’ve known previously, and we find ourselves unintentionally floating in that temporal space between before and after.

You’ll make it to the other side regardless, but it’s possible to embrace that moment and to tap it for inspiration and insight.

You’re more likely to be able to see what was warping your perception previously, and what might influence your decisions, soon, from the perspective of that in-between stage. That perspective can be useful if you’re hoping to better understand your unaltered self, and if you want to perceive facets of your personality and desires that are often obscured by the priorities of the moment and the goals you’re busy pursuing while walking a particular path.

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