I moved to Paris because the chairs face outwards
Chapter 6: A sweet interlude that lands me in my new home
This is a chapter in my Book Serialisation project. You’re new here? You can start at the beginning and navigate around using this Table of Contents if you like.
Quick recap: This book is about how to live in a collapsing civilisation. We have outlined what collapse is and how and why we’re in it. We’re now playing around with mindsets and ways of being for a bit. The last chapter covered the spirituality space we are necessarily thrust into… you can catch up here.
The audio version is at the bottom, ditto my Writers Notes. These are available only to subscribers. Ditto the conversation where we workshop things together.
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Liminality
“Midway through life’s journey
I woke to find myself in a darkened wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.”
- Dante
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Liminality is a lovely word. It has an onomatopoeic tinkle to it.
It describes a time or a space between two things and stems from the Greek for threshold, that place between two rooms, such as a hallway or a doctor’s waiting room. In liminality one door has shut behind us, the next has not opened. And we are left in a fluorescent-lit, eerie no-man’s land.
Moving from childhood to adulthood is liminal. So too, I reckon, perimenopause for women. We’ve shed one biologically (and culturally) determined identity, but we’ve not quite stepped into our next one (Doyenne? Elder? Warrior? Muse? Radical?). We’re in a pause, an anteroom of our power.
When a relationship ends, and you are no longer in love, but you haven’t committed to leaving yet, this is a liminal time. I think mourning the death of a loved one is also liminal. They’ve gone, but we haven’t found our new way of living without them yet.
In liminality we grieve what has passed or died, as well as fear what’s ahead. Teen angst expresses this tug of war – a raging, hormonally charged sense of loss is pit against the overwhelm of the responsibilities and expectations that start to flood in. Which is why we once had initiation ceremonies that helped us traverse this ambivalence.
Similarly, pagan celebrations held us as we moved from season to season. Passover and wakes served similar hand-holding purposes. Many Indigenous cultures have managed to hold onto these rituals, but most other societies abandoned theirs over decades of progressive de-collectivism. Kids now pass into adulthood awkwardly, reluctantly and with mental illness; they turn to Andrew Tate and dark online fantasy worlds.
Today we move between seasons and stages of life – and, now, technologically accelerated epochs - unbuttressed and going at the wrong pace for our delicate nervous systems, forever overwhelmed and viscerally terrified of all the unknown unknowns. [Writing this just now makes me feel such compassion for all the grappling humans!] We struggle to process the grief, the fear and the fluorescent-lit eeriness. Yes, it’s the wrong pace! We are bone-heavy, reflective creatures, we need to pause together, to look at each other and fathom things collectively.
I think this is at the heart of our global trauma.
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I have found it helpful to see our current moment as a liminality.
We are between an old world, or an old “normal”, that is dying, and a new world that’s yet to become. It feels like a suspended anticipation, an incapable-of-being-named period in time in which we find it impossible to look forward to where we are heading and to tell our children how things will go.
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“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
- Antonio Gramsci
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“If you’re staying attached to the status quo right now, you will be unhinged, because there is nothing there.”
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Now, there’s a tendency to regard inbetweeness as a nothingness (no-thingness) that we flail around in like a Coyote suspended over a terrifying, infinite chasm, legs pedalling madly, reaching for a solid edge.
But it’s way more helpful to see liminality as a convergence, or emergence. I visualise a Venn diagram.
Per the above, liminality is still connected to the “No Longer” past, from which we can selectively draw what we cherished and carry it into a “not yet” future that we are actually already in, that we are becoming and that we creating right now by just being in it. The philosophical and scientific concept of emergence comes into play here. Emergence describes when a system, or a bunch of systems, gets to a level of complexity such that its “becoming” is more than the sum of the parts from which it emerges. It takes on a life of its own we can neither predict nor control.
You’ll notice that where we are right now - in that “liminal” convergence - is shaded darker, and definitely not a no-thing. Indeed, ours is a heavy, dark and potent time in which the consequences of our choices, I feel, will be more profound than ever before in determining what emerges.
Bref2, I don’t think we are in a time we just wait out or hope our way through.
No, no.
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Previous liminal eras have been notably potent.
The philosopher Karl Jaspers singled out the volatile “in-between time” in history from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE and called it the “axial age”. He describes it as an “interregnum between two ages of great empire…a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness”. Jaspers argued that the suspended era of uncertainty was marked by radical creativity where the "unquestioned grasp on life is loosened" and "man asked radical questions".
The list of contributions that spouted from this period is epic: Hinduism, Buddism, Judaisim, scepticism, nihilism, Taoism and Confucianism, Sophism, Plato, Socrates, Homer and the economic market. “Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West,” Jasper’s wrote in The Origin and Goal of History.
I’ll get to another potent liminal time in a minute, but for now I want to plant this: This era we straddle is hard; we were, as Stephen Jenkinson tells us, “born to a troubled time”. But we were also born to an incredibly stunning time.
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The Chinese word for “crisis” - wei ji - also means “opportunity”.
The English word “crisis” stems from the Greek krisis, which also means “to decide”.
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I just had this (after)thought. Adolescence is liminal. We have been somewhat stuck in a liminal not-quite-adulting era for decades. The challenge before us, then, is to “decide” to emerge into a full collective adulthood.
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At some point in this journey, I clipped and saved a line written by William Davies, author of This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain: “To experience a crisis is to inhabit a world that is temporarily up for grabs”. Yes!
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And so it was, at 49 and midway through my adult years, I moved to Paris. I was also partway into writing this book. And entering peri-menopause. Fully liminal stuff!
Why Paris? I’m asked this a lot. Because, I like to say, the chairs face outwards.