At the threshold

Sitting by yourself in an airport with those wide, open windows first thing in the morning with the sounds of the shops setting up for the day. Hotel corridors that have a symmetry whether you look down one way or the other as you wheel your bag to your room with the muffled echo of the lift bell behind you. The soft buzz of fluorescent lights in an empty foodcourt or cafeteria, that sense of the SCP-esque uncanny amplified by the frenetic glow of videos playing on screens with the sound down. Walking through a densely wooded forest with trees stretching into the canopy above and spreading around you into the chilly autumn fog beyond your line of sight.

There’s something about liminal spaces that evokes a feeling of balancing on the precipice of the unknown. For some, that feeling tips towards wonder, for others towards horror. It’s the kind of uncertainty that puts your body in a state of alert as it approaches a friction point where you could be both nervous and excited and both closed or open to what’s to come. Psychophysiologically, that’s the body’s response to stress — the feeling of fight-or-flight when adrenaline courses through you. In non-life-threatening situations, that feeling is simultaneously threat and invitation, and it’s that in-between that makes liminal states a generative powerhouse for possibility. Nothing is fixed and you can choose to act, have the space to pull at threads, or venture down avenues that have yet to be explored.

The discomfort of not knowing can hinder you in this state, creating urgency that encourages you rush to an answer. But if you resist that urge to hurry and instead seek out the open-endedness of ‘why’, ‘what if’, and ‘how about’, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to chain and combine ideas that a shortest-path-first strategy might stop you from entertaining.

In practice, it’s about taking your time and staying in a liminal space long enough to notice something or observe what lies beyond the surface. Out in the world, this might take the form of flânerie, which directly translates as ‘strolling’ from the French, but is more of a philosophy around the way you take the world in. Or it might be ‘slow looking’ as described by Shari Tishman in her book Slow looking: The art and practice of learning through observation as an approach and mindset for observation that can give you the tools to uncover connections between objects and systems.

When you don’t have the answer, patience is the practice. You’re suspended between the known and unknown and that’s uncomfortable. But staying in that moment is an active choice because you’ve made the conscious decision to engage with what’s around you right now to see what there is to learn about the uncertainty.

I speak often about this, of sitting with the unknown, because it’s not just about a practice, it’s about my lived practice. Throughout my career I’ve been drawn to early-stage work and startups because this stage of a business is still liminal. It’s a time where both culture and purpose finds its footing, where enthusiasm combined with uncertainty keeps people open to divergent thinking.1 It’s when this open-ended and open-minded approach has the most traction because there are puzzle pieces to place, and patterns to match, but while the intention is set, the solutions can be fluid.

This is a practice I carry through other aspects of my life as well because liminality is all around us. There’s a lot that you don’t know, yet, and every thread is an opportunity to be excited about exploring with gentle curiosity.

Stay curious,

— Michele