2/1/19
On March 12th I will close the office door on my forty-five year career as a clinical social worker. What a privilege it’s been. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to be in a helping relationship with so many courageous people who entrusted me to help them solve problems, to deal with the challenges of mental illnesses, to navigate life’s twists and turns, to make better lives for themselves and their families. I’ve learned so much from them and from the exceptional colleagues I’ve been fortune to associate with in each practice setting.
I’m ready for this change. I’m tired and want to use my energy for different things now. Yet the process is proving harder than I’d expected, more emotional, with more anxiety. It feels very strange, sometimes scary to apply the “R” word to myself. Retirement. What’s that going to look like?
I am standing in liminal space. Liminal derives from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold. Liminal spaces can be physical, like a door way, a stairway, a crossroads; a crossing over space. But my liminal space is an emotional, psychological in between place that is a transition time, a passage from one status to another. I am in the process of leaving something behind but I am not yet in the something new .
Leavings and letting go are not my strongest suit. I form strong attachments. I feel emotionally vulnerable in this liminal space. This quote from Sarah A. Allen captures my experience and reassures me.
“She understood that the hardest times in life to go through were when you were transitioning from one version of yourself to another.”
By the time one is nearly 70, there have been many of those times, I remind myself.
This liminal time, and the next which will be when I close that office door for good, are also openings, opportunities for my spiritual growth. Recently I’ve been exploring what it means to surrender. This time is certainly an invitation to that practice, an invitation to trust the process, to let go of role and identity based on work, on doing. It feels uncertain, disorienting like time in the wee hours of the morning when one rests in between sleep and wakefulness, when nothing feels solid. I want to be fully present in this time, to “Honor the space between no longer and not yet”, as Nancy Levin writes. This is a time and space where something new can emerge if I can allow myself to stand still with faith and trust that the process will unfold as it is meant to do.
If you’re standing in liminal space, too, this meditation by John O’Donahue may speak you as it does to me.