Liminal Space

Liminal Space

Do you ever have trouble finding the words for the big conversations? You know, the ones where you long to communicate some deep truth, pulled from the centre of your being with a huge effort, where it feels like you are standing completely naked in front of the other person?

I’m struggling with this. I feel so utterly changed by the last four weeks of my life, but yet unable to properly talk about it with those I love most. I’ve turtled up inside, processing and going dark to the outside world.

This is likely a necessary step, and healthy, but it’s also a tiny bit isolating. It creates a gap between you and the people in your life. I know I have the right to say I’m not ready to talk about things, and this might be the best solution until I feel more sure of what it is I want to say, but the big conversations in life always leave me slightly terrified.

So much of our existence is regular routine. Only when it’s disrupted do we see things in a new way. And we realize that we are also irrevocably altered.

Liminal SpaceI learned this phrase from Rob Bell’s recent podcast on Seasons (and if you aren’t listening to all of Rob Bell’s podcasts, please rectify this immediately as they will immensely improve your quality of life): liminal space. It means the middle space; when one stage is completed and the next has yet to begin.

I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear the phrase “liminal space”. I love it and plan to overuse it from this point forward. It explains so much of that waiting bit at the centre of big change. It’s transition, uncertainty, fear, loss, excitement. You know you don’t want to go back but you can’t quite move forward as the next chapter hasn’t revealed itself.

Perhaps it’s not a good idea to commit to much in the liminal space. It’s for waiting and growing and shifting. It requires an openness to what will now be different. We can’t forecast what the next season will look like while we are still moving through the loss of what came before. We simply have to wait.

Have I mentioned that I hate waiting? This appendectomy and its long, slow crawl back to my previous healthy state has invited me every single day to be patient. To stop accomplishing and just sit in my new and tired state in my comfy shorts that don’t hurt my stitches. The whole world seems different as a result. It may still be whizzing by, along with everyone around me, but I am in a separate place and I can’t keep up. Nor do I really want to.

I do feel marked in some invisible way. I can see it, but no one else really can. I guess the prescription is more waiting. I must allow this growth to bud in its own time. There is no point to rushing it or shouting something from the rooftops that I barely understand for myself. Some things should be private, particularly in the liminal space.

If you are in a transition point right now, let’s wait it out together. We can reassure each other that we won’t be in this middle space forever. The new season will begin to take shape. We will survive the transition. We have the ability to let go of the last place where we were either happy or sad (or more likely a mix of both). It will simply take a little bit of time. Sit with me in the garden and we’ll encourage each other through this liminal space.

Uncertainty

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is a part of life for everyone. We can defend ourselves against it, using strategies such as denial, manipulation and over-confidence in our ability to control outcomes, but at the end of the day the result is the same: uncertainty is always a factor.

I’m a Type A personality, so I find uncertainty to be an uncomfortable bedfellow. And yet as I practice going with the stream and not against it, I discover a fresh source of peace and contentment. When I believed I was the centre of the universe, by squeezing my eyes shut and willing certain things to occur, I felt more in control of my circumstances. But I paid a high price in stress for this make-believe certainty.

It was never real. Not then, not now. It’s the equivalent of a toddler standing in the middle of the room with her chubby hands pressed against her eye sockets, shouting, “You can’t see me!” I’m embarrassed to say I lived more than three decades of my life with this as a worldview. But the older I get, the clearer my uncertainty becomes.

I’m more certain now in my uncertainty than I ever was in my certainty. I’ve said that before and I’m sure I’ll state it many more times before I’m through. The sheer relief of admitting out loud that I don’t have the answers and I never really did is liberating. It’s the bubbles in a freshly-poured glass of Prosecco. It’s the helium that allows you to soar above your surroundings and see the bigger picture.

UNCERTAINTYUncertainty means you need faith on a daily basis. It requires you to let go of your preconceived ideas about how any experience or relationship should go and invites you to surrender to what is and not what you want it to be. Living this way allows you to recognize that you are one part of this world and not the whole shebang. You play a small but valuable role but huge amounts of this life are above and beyond what you can influence or manage. And this is more than okay.

I am practicing staying in each moment I am in. I don’t allow myself to forecast far into the future any more, for too much will shift and change and I’ll be forced to re-evaluate anyway. So I may as well just decide once, when the moment is upon me, instead of having fifty outcomes mapped out. It simply takes too much energy to live that way.

If you need permission not to have all the answers, please accept this from me. You are not the world’s Wikipedia. As Rumi said, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” We are marvellously complete, all on our own, but we must live this life to the best of our ability day by day. We don’t have to see around every upcoming bend, simply because we cannot. The job is too big and we are defeated before we begin.

It’s lovely in some ways to live in this age of instant information, but it messes with our natural rhythms. We aren’t sages or fortune tellers. We aren’t certain of what is coming. What we do have is our natural intuition, our sense of humour, our huge, warm hearts that can love without measure. We don’t have certainty of what will happen next or a set prescription for how others should behave.

We are responsible for ourselves and for our dependent children. We can let the rest slide from our shoulders. We can walk away from the drama and the fears of others that spread like wildfire if we let them. We can learn to live with uncertainty; to talk ourselves through it the way we get our kids through difficult situations. By breathing, discussing it in a calm manner, eating a bowl of chips or some chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

Uncertainty is part of life. We may as well embrace it instead of fighting it.

Clarifying Priorities

Clarifying Priorities

It takes hard times for many of us to clarify our priorities. When life is smooth and easy, we become complacent, bored, discontented. We get restless and little things crop up to irritate and annoy us.

But then we face a crisis or a tragedy and everything around us looks different. We are changed, from the inside out, and what mattered to us days or weeks before can suddenly shift and settle into a new form.

This has happened to me with my recent hospital stay and my slow recovery. I see now that I had a desperate need to slow down within myself; to learn how to rest and simply be instead of fretting about achieving. I had to practice allowing myself to be loved and cared for, not because I was proving that I deserved that affection, but just because it sprang from the depths of another’s soul. I had to remove myself from my own performance in order to see that I was loved even laying in a hospital bed with a tube in my throat, unable to talk or impress anyone.

clarifyingprioritiesGetting home and recovering, inch by painful inch, day after day, I understand now what it means to be patient. How healing it is to turn my life setting to low instead of high. How much I notice when I am resting instead of running. The details of life become sharp and crisp, instead of blurry and distant.

I am changed. I can finally see what’s important and what isn’t important. Proving, striving, yearning…all a waste of precious time and energy. Being present, grateful, authentic…these things have staying power. They sustain, enrich, nourish. I have gifts to give to myself and to others. I will not minimize these any longer. They matter. I matter. Those I love and cherish matter.

Pain is truly a marvellous teacher. None of us would throw up our hand to volunteer to struggle, to weep, to be shoehorned into surrender. But yet it gives us a chance to re-evaluate what we are doing with our time, energy and money. It offers us a unique window into our motives, our deepest fears, our unsatisfied yearnings. Our unexamined beliefs about who we are and what we are doing in this world.

Like spring cleaning, our souls need refreshing from time to time. Usually circumstances will create this opportunity for us, whether we like it or not. It could be surgery, or the loss of someone close to us, financial troubles, behavioural concerns or a host of other unforeseen situations. They offer us a mirror, into our truest selves, which we can choose to examine or ignore.

My priorities look radically different now. I’m grateful for this, even though I never would’ve chosen the path that brought me to this place. But we all must play the hand we are dealt. This internal work is for a lifetime, with endless journeys to undertake and truths to understand. I know who I am now, on a deeper level, and there are no shortcuts to arrive at this type of meaningful significance that has the power to shift an entire life to a new level.

Laser Focus

Laser Focus

An interesting thing has happened since my appendix ruptured two weeks ago: I’ve developed laser focus. Before I got so sick and spent a week in the hospital recovering from post-surgery complications, I would look at my life with a long-range lens; fretting over this or that and always planning way out into the future.

Laying in a hospital bed alone changes all that. You are poked and prodded at all hours of the day and night. You fight for your very dignity as a human being, grateful beyond measure for the kindness of specific nurses and doctors. Your illusions of control melt away, water under the bridge of your own failing competence.

I learned in the hospital to take my recovery minute by minute. I’m not throwing up violently at this second? That’s a win. Five days of an awful NG tube, rubbing my throat and nose raw and meaning I can’t eat or drink until every vile, trapped thing in my stomach is vacuumed out so my nausea abates? The morning the doctors finally say it can be removed, I cry with the kind of joy I thought was only reserved for my wedding day or the births of my two children.

Laser FocusLife is chock full of wins and losses. Ups and downs. Strengths and weaknesses. In these last two weeks, arguably the most challenging of my life so far, my line of vision has become intensely small. Focused and specific, instead of generalized and broad.

When you don’t eat or drink for 7 days, that first taste of apple juice is the greatest sensation on earth. That spoonful of vanilla pudding that doesn’t come immediately back up. The Arrowroot baby cookie, consumed at 2 am in the milky darkness of the acute care ward with soft snores of other patients filling the air around you, was like the finest of gourmet meals to me.

My senses are awake again. Thoughts of digestion and standing up to get more water and planning out my next snack consume my day. I don’t kiss my children while thinking about my to-do list any more. Now they are so precious, standing in front of me in their summer pajamas with their hair wet from a shower, and they deserve every ounce of my attention and focus.

How many times have I heard the saying, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything”? I truly didn’t understand it before, but I do now. I was a person who needed to learn to slow down, and I don’t do anything by half measures. I have been brought low by this burst appendix, the “lazy bowel” that followed surgery, then the large blood clot in my wrist from my last IV once I returned home.

Each challenge must be faced in turn. Everything else falls away. The big picture shrinks to the next hour: what I will eat, if I’m sleepy enough to have a nap, what do the kids need. I’ve learned that this is more than enough. My gratitude rises, as if on a float, to the level I allow for it. My blessings, in the form of family and friends, the ones you can really count on, become crystal clear.

The rest fades away. It truly does not matter. I am changed, from the inside out, from this hard-scrabble season of pain and struggle. I am enough for this challenge and the ones that are sure to come after it. I can endure the toughest experiences and so can you. I’m not interested in fixating on some pre-set idea of success in some far-away future anymore. What I have is this day, this moment, these people; this ballooning, expanding, growing love inside me that spreads into every corner of my small but significant world.

Lessons from the Hospital

Lessons from the Hospital

So, my appendix ruptured in the middle of last week and I’ve been in the hospital for 5 days now and counting recovering from post-surgery complications and issues.

lessons from the hospitalI’ve learned a lot from this experience. Type A Go-Getters like myself don’t do well recovering at a snail’s pace, with one step forward and three back every damn day. I want to see results. I want to be the BEST at recovering, not the worst.

But what we cannot control, we must learn to accept. Kicking and screaming, maybe, but fighting what we can’t alter is a fool’s errand. To that end, these are some key things I’ve learned in my five days of recovery so far from appendicitis:

Our Bodies are Equally Strong and Frail

My mom reminded me that recovering from surgery is like labour: it helps to get out of the way and let your body do what it knows how to do. When you are tired, rest. When you need to get your bowels moving, walk. When you are puking into a tin in the middle of the night, totally lost, wasted and alone, trust that your body is doing the best that it can to heal.

In this way, I have newfound respect for my body and I feel more ready than ever to let go of my stupid issues about wishing my stomach was flatter or my arms sleeker. My body is a machine, like yours, and it’s healthy to respect what it can do.

The frail part is harder to come to terms with. In the hospital, on my many daily walks around the ward, you see all manners of human frailty in each room. Someone passed away this morning in my ward and family members were clinging to each other and sobbing in the hallways outside of my room. Life does not last forever. It is only here, given to each of us, for a limited, precious, important, undetermined amount of time. We’d best not waste it.

Patience is a Virtue

I spend way too much time rushing through life. Achieving, accomplishing, worrying, Netflix-binging, trying to prove I’m valuable and worthy. What is it all for? In the hospital, you have a lot of time to stare at the wall, cursing your 4-day NG tube and dreaming about the food and drink you aren’t allowed to have because of your lazy bowels and debilitating nausea from bile build-up.

The things that really matter; those you love who love you with their whole-heart in return come to the forefront. The friends you can call and you know they will pick up your kids and love on them. The offers of support, love and encouragement from all over the place. That’s the important stuff right there. Not the to-do list and the being superwoman. Slowing things down was what I needed to see what really matters.

Receiving is as Crucial as Giving

I’m a giver. Always have been. Receiving feels uncomfortable and even selfish to me. So to be this ill, with my supportive and fabulous husband a province away when my surgery was happening meant that I had to receive from a variety of people. I had to let myself need others and it was an eye-opening, beautiful experience.

I told Jason not to fly back, but he was too worried and ignored me. So he came, to bring the kids to see me each day over the long weekend, and this was wonderful. But I also reached out to my mom and many friends for help and they gave it, with such abundance it was like a blooming flower garden in my own heart, where I could stop and smell and get lost in love and inspiration.

There are many more lessons, but I’ve wiped myself out typing this to hit my blog deadline for tomorrow so I shall stop. Plus I just saw a prisoner shuffle past my room in his flappy, vulnerable hospital gown and IV stand, two burly guards walking slowly beside him, the prisoner in leg chains. We are all humbled by the hospital, by our own weakness and frailty. We are levelled, brought out of our disguises and into our true selves. We are revealed to be both more than we thought and less. We are real, humble, true, honest. We are beautiful.