Threshold Moments
Photo by Pietro De Grandi on Unsplash
“I’m a dweller of the threshold and I’m waiting at the door, and I’m standing in the darkness, I don’t want to wait no more.”
— Van Morrison
My daughter is five months old today. Five months ago, breath by laboring breath, she crossed from her mother’s womb into the bright lit world.
My nephew also turned fifteen today. He stands as tall as any man, one leg still in the wide expanse of childhood, the other stepping tentatively into the heady, hormonal kingdom of teenagers.
And I left my job today. After more than two years, I crossed from the safety net of a steady paycheck to the question mark of life on my own terms.
So, yeah, it‘s a big day for our family :-)
“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.”
― William Blake
All these milestones have me thinking about thresholds. Those places and spaces and moments where life changes; sometimes so dramatically we have no choice but to reconfigure our selves; other times so quietly that, if we’re not paying attention, we miss the moment all together.
Much as we might try to avoid or ignore those big ones, they come for us all. The end of a relationship. The loss of a loved one. The illness that lays us low.
They’re not all scary, of course. They can be blessedly joyful too. The day my wife and I got married was one of the most beautiful days I’ve ever lived. And the moment my daughter came into the world is almost indescribable, as close as I’ve ever come to truly understanding the miracle of nature, a billion years of life, adapting, evolving, reproducing, so that a baby girl might be born in the midst of a snow storm in the early days of March 2018.
Photo by kilarov zaneit on Unsplash
“I have a thing for doors. I always think of them as a threshold to something new.”
— Jada Pinkett Smith
Threshold moments like these, if we take the time to honor them and make sense of them, give us perspective on who we are and where we came from, and they offer clues about where we’re going next, whether we’re ready or not.
I think its those quiet transitions — the ones we have to make sure we pay attention to lest we miss them — that prepare us for the big ones. What makes a birthday different than any other day? The simple fact that we choose to stop and honor the moment. Counting from the minute of your birth, the earth has just completed another circuit around the great golden star that is our sun. And you are still alive. Still here. Still breathing.
Honoring your birthday is to honor the fact that you are here at all, when you just as easily might not have been. It is a threshold we cross year after year after year, until we cross it one last time, passing beyond the veil of knowing to whatever comes next.
If you think about it, this is true of every day we live. As Mahatma Gandhi purportedly said, “Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” A threshold crossed in dreaming so that we may wake again anew.
Photo by kyler trautner on Unsplash
“If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective.”
— Mark Nepo
What we give our attention to grows in meaning and import. What we take for granted dwindles into the background, unnoticed, unmeasured, meaningless. The challenge today, perhaps more than at any point in human history, is the sheer glut of information we’re swimming in. There is so much to take in, so much else to take for granted. Newsfeeds and television screens and movie scenes. Errant tweets and violent screeds and crowded streets. Great works of art and grumpy cat memes, all vying for our time and attention, wondrous, terrifying, comical, insatiable, perpetual. Moment piling on top of moment, every single one staking a claim to meaning and importance.
But if every moment means the same as every other, do they mean anything at all?
Photo by Victoriano Izquierdo on Unsplash
“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.”
— Khalil Gibran
Threshold moments grant us those fleeting glimpses of perspective we so desperately need to locate our selves in the midst of this deluge. The milestones we choose to mark on the road from birth to death tell the story of our life. They are the chapters and the verses, the quiet pauses and the dramatic peaks. They knit a sense of wholeness, of one overarching story, out of the countless disparate moments that make a life.
Religion, for all its failings, understands this. At its best, religion offers us the sacred gift of ritual. Of reflection. Of silence and ceremony and sanctuary. A reminder that we can be so much more then just skin and blood and bones.
But you don’t need to adhere to any particular faith to benefit from this wisdom. Arnold Van Gennep, a French anthropolgist and keen observer of human behaviour, studied ritual ceremonies from cultures across the world. In his landmark book Rites of Passage, he saw that the cultural milestones of human life differ only in the details. They are, in essence, universal.
“Life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way. And there are always new thresholds to cross: the threshold of summer and winter, of season or a year, of a month, of a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife — for those who believe in it.”
― Arnold van Gennep
Take a breath.
Right now, at this very moment, whether you know it or not, you are standing at a threshold.
A doorway, right nearby, just out of sight. All you need to do is turn and walk through it.
The rest of your life is waiting on the other side.
——
[Photo credit to Joshua Sortino on Unsplash]