Freedom
On entering more spacious places in our lives...
I love the freedom this sign offers. I was walking at Brodie Castle with a good friend last September and I noticed a sign as we entered the park area.
It read,
'Go where you like!
No wrong turns.’
It spoke to me because for as long as I’ve known I’ve always felt this sense of needing to get it right or that there was a particular path carved out for me. This sense of needing to be on the right path. I think it comes out of a place that is good and wants to be doing the right thing but for me this can also at times feel oppressive and that can be stifling.
I’ve found that needing to be on a specific path has felt like I was walking a tightrope at times. It has kept me stuck in places for longer than I’ve wanted to be there.
But the flip side of this is that there is also something quite scary about the freedom of going wherever you like.
It can feel a bit unhinged.
A bit untethered.
Despite that, this is a space that I’m longing to step into more.
A spacious place.
A place where it’s ok to experiment.
I think it’s the feeling that you’re carrying all the responsibility of the decision you’re making. That’s the scary thing for me. If it goes wrong it’s all down to me.
But that mindset. That way of thinking is so rooted in fear. It’s rooted in the belief in a negative outcome.
I want to live more freely in my mind as much as in my actual life. To believe first that it might all work out rather than thinking about the worst case scenario.
I want to live like it’s ok to explore some things and see how they work out. Like it’s ok to try. A place where it’s also ok to change your mind.
A place where it’s all ok.
Freedom lives here.
This season for me has been one of sensing that I’m leaving one space and due to enter another but it has felt like I’m right in the middle of nowhere.
A liminal space.
We find ourselves in an in-between space which author and theologian, Richard Rohr, describes as: “the space…where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown.”
For those of us who like to be in the know, this can be a little unsettling. We are uncertain and not in control.
But it’s also an invitation. I’m trying to see it this way.
It’s also an invitation to trust.
I have lived most of my 40 years with some element of my brain believing more in fear than in trust.
I want to change.
I want to believe that I’m held in this world rather than believing I have to make it on my own.
I want to take risks knowing that in doing so, it encourages me to grow and to actually live out what a life of trust looks like.
A few weeks ago I read Holy Transitions by CAC, which says, “The Latin word limen means “threshold.” Liminal space is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation where we can begin to think and act in new ways. It is where we are betwixt and between, in transition, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next. We usually enter liminal space when our former way of being is challenged or changed—perhaps when we lose a job or a loved one, during illness, at the birth of a child, or a major relocation. It is a graced time, but often does not feel “graced” in any way. In such space, we are not certain or in control.
The very vulnerability and openness of liminal space allows room for something genuinely new to happen. We are empty and receptive—blank tablets waiting for new words. Liminal space is where we are most teachable, often because we are most humbled. Liminality keeps us in an ongoing state of shadowboxing instead of ego-confirmation, struggling with the hidden side of things, and calling so-called normalcy into creative question.
It’s no surprise then that we generally avoid liminal space. Much of the work of authentic spirituality and human development is to get people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough that they can learn something essential and new. [1]
We all need to consciously spend time at the thresholds of our lives, and we need wise elders to create and hold such spaces for us. Liminality is a form of holding the tension between one space and another. It is in these transitional moments of our lives that authentic transformation can happen. Otherwise, it is just business as usual and an eternally boring, status quo existence.”
I’m not sure about you but I welcome the invitation to adventure. I don’t want to live an “eternally boring, status quo existence.”
I want to fully live.
To take risks uncertain of the end result. To exercise my trust muscles.
I want to fully live.
As always, I hope this speaks gently to you on your way.
Until the next time.