The space inbetween.

There are times in life when we find ourselves standing somewhere we cannot quite name.

Behind us is something we know. Ahead of us, something we cannot yet see. And between the two is a corridor.

It can be a frightening place.

The light is poor. There are doors, but we don’t know which ones will open. We cannot see where the corridor ends and, when we turn around, the room we came from somehow doesn’t look quite the same anymore.

Our instinct is to get through it.

Find the door. Make the decision. Get somewhere recognisable again.

Anything but remain in the uncertainty.

There is a name for this place: liminal space.

The word liminal comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. It describes that peculiar territory between what was and what will be. The old shape of things has loosened, but whatever comes next has not yet taken form.

We tend to experience this as a problem.

I wonder if it might be one of life’s great opportunities.

Because there is another way to look at that corridor.

For perhaps the first time in a long time, there is space around you. Nothing has been decided yet. Nothing has settled into its final shape.

And I know that place very well.

For much of my working life, I was a creative. My job was essentially to begin with something that didn’t exist and somehow find a way to make it exist.

The beginning of a brief was often the most frightening part.

A blank page. A problem without a solution. And an inner monologue that could quickly get noisy.

Can I do this?

Can I find something different?

Will it be good enough?

My approach to answering those questions got me into hot water more times than I care to remember.

Why aren’t you at your desk? Where are you?

When Kath and I first met, we worked together in an agency. She would laugh that I was “unemployable”.

Astute as ever.

But the answer was often that I was walking somewhere. Or running. Or simply away from the place where everyone assumed the work should be happening.

I learnt that staring harder at a problem didn’t necessarily make the answer appear.

I needed to quieten my mind first. To breathe. To move. To carry the problem with me without demanding that it immediately give me an answer.

From the outside, I suspect it sometimes looked as though I had wandered away from the work.

I hadn’t.

I was in it.

I stood my ground because eventually something would appear.

A thread. A connection between two things that hadn’t previously belonged together. A small idea worth following.

And then, slowly, direction.

Looking back, I realise I was learning something much more important than how to solve a creative brief.

I was learning how to remain in the space before the answer.

To resist the anxiety that tells us we must know. To allow uncertainty to exist without immediately trying to kill it with a decision. And perhaps most importantly, to trust that not knowing what comes next does not mean that nothing is happening.

That way of working has become part of the backbone of how I work with people today.

When somebody sits opposite me without knowing what comes next, I don’t believe my job is to hand them an answer.

It is to help create enough space for them to hear themselves properly. To quieten the noise. To stay with the questions that matter. To resist grabbing at the first available certainty simply because certainty feels safer.

Then, when something begins to emerge, we can find direction. We can give it purpose. We can move towards it.

But there is something else I have come to understand.

You don’t have to walk the corridor alone.

There is a tendency when we feel uncertain to retreat from other people. To disappear until we have worked ourselves out. To return when we have something coherent to say about who we are and where we are going.

I think we have that backwards.

Connection matters most when the map has stopped making sense.

Sometimes we don’t need someone to show us which door to open. We need someone willing to walk beside us while we find out.

And perhaps that changes the corridor.

It is still unknown. It may still be uncomfortable. But it no longer needs to be lonely.

So if you find yourself standing in that space inbetween, don’t be in such a hurry to reach the other end.

Look around.

Breathe.

Let your eyes adjust to the darkness.

There may be more here than you first imagined.

The absence of an answer is not the absence of possibility.

Have enough faith to remain unfinished for a while. Stay close to people. Stay curious about the doors you haven’t opened. Allow yourself to wander a little without believing you are lost.

Because one day you may look back at that intimidating corridor and realise it was never simply somewhere you had to pass through.

It was a space to grow.

A place where the old shape of your life had loosened its grip and whatever came next had not yet been decided.

A rare stretch of existence where the answer was still unwritten.

Where the darkness you were so eager to escape was simply your eyes adjusting to possibility.

Don’t rush through it.

Have the faith to stay there long enough to see what emerges.

Because the space inbetween may turn out to be the most creative endeavour
of your life.