The magic of liminal time

Reflecting on 2023, my failures, and the hard lessons of in-between time

I used to go to a gym that had one of those vibration plate thingys. Would watch with Irish-girl-second-hand-embarrassment —“Scarlet for them”— and secret envy at the sheer audacious self-confidence of the people who willingly exposed themselves to the discomfiting, violent shaking of every inch of flesh as they battled through a set of squats.

“10 squats on here is like doing 50 normal”, I heard a trainer say.

I regret not having given it a go. It might have prepared me better for 2023 — a year when every action, small or large, felt magnified in intensity. A year spent on a vibration plate. Bouncing around, buzzing all over, in a flurry, moving fast, but strapped in to violently shaking, stationary beast, going nowhere.

2023 feels like the year that got away from me.

Goals unmet. The best of intentions abandoned. Effort alone wasn’t enough.

Oh well.

Oh! Well?

Well, what can you do but chalk it down for what it was — a bit of a fail.

I’m okay with that.

I’m comfortable with naming a failure for what it is, to not gloss it over, put the positive spin on it; to not re-frame it as a ‘learning opportunity’ It’s easier, and more generative (for me), to simply say “I failed in achieving what I wanted to achieve”. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to reflect on it. Being comfortable with failure doesn’t absolve you of the need to assess it — what actually went wrong? Or more importantly, where did you go wrong?

My singular greatest failure (and regret) in 2023 is that I did not complete my analysis of the (what now, in finality, number) 37 life story interviews with women of Ireland: the heart of ‘The Women of Ireland’ Project.

That was my primary goal for 2023, but my Trello (project tracker) marks its incomplete status:

Overdue. 59% complete. 22 out of 37 interviews analysed:

What went wrong? I set myself an unachievable goal.

(Because)

Where did I go wrong?

I made a goal based on how I’ve done every other research project I’ve ever worked on in my ‘academic’ life/career — plough through vast amounts of qualitative research data in quick-time, pull out all the ‘gold’ and write it up into a nice, neat, understandable package.

I forget that The Women of Ireland Project is not every other research project I’ve ever worked on (duh!). It is always asking something different of me — different ways of working and thinking — and it always takes me a while to see it, because I’m having to break and (un)learn old ways of doing things while figuring out new, better, more nutritive ones.

And what I found —only realised in the last few days of ‘New Year’ self-reflection— is that every time I completed the analysis of one interview, I never could do what I’ve always done; move straight into analysing the next with barely a breath.

Every time I got stuck. Sometimes it felt like I had ‘unfinished business’ with the interview I’d just completed — more to think through, more to make sense of, a niggling feeling that my interpretation of some elements of an individual’s story needed refining. Other times I was emotionally drained. And I just needed a break.

I was failing. I was stuck because I wasn’t moving forward; wasn’t making progress. That’s what it felt like at the time, anyway.

But maybe I wasn’t stuck?

I’d entered liminal, in-between time. And with every passing year, as I (thanks to Mari Kennedy’s Celtic Wheel course) re-tune myself to real-life nature, seasonal time (not made-up, human, modern world time) I realise more and more that liminal time is perhaps the most important time of all.

Not many people will tell you that though. If anything, we’re shamed away from taking pauses. It looks lazy. Unproductive. What are you doing if you’re not doing anything?

I think it’s the fear of the discomfort. Because in-between time is painful. It’s ambiguous, unfixed, and untethered. And I hated nearly every minute I was forced to spend in it, watching myself fail to meet my self-imposed goals as time moved on and I sat, violently shaken on the vibration plate of my confused thoughts, trying to make sense of each interview, understand the emotional experience, ‘going nowhere’.

The hours, days and weeks I spent in liminal time between interviews utterly annihilated my arbitrary deadlines. And that caused me intense stress.

But, looking back, I’ll take the stress and the discomfort of those forced pauses over and over because each one was necessary. It was essential integration time; time to absorb the story of each individual participant more wholly, and more clearly, and see how it was interwoven with others. Liminal time is uncomfortable, but it’s also the dreamy, juicy space where magic happens if you can manage to just stay there a while.

Dark morning January views: Nature is still in liminal time

We’re there now — seasonally speaking — in liminal time, in these post-Winter Solstice days. I like how Mari Kennedy describes it as dreamtime. Time when seeds of new possibilities start to emerge, and whispers of new ideas, projects and desires tentatively start to tug within us.

I’ve felt this keenly the last few days. I’m full of New Year hope. Buzzing with plans and goals and intentions for the year ahead — they have just sprung up, out of nowhere, as if by magic — and they excite me.

And yet, I have to be cautious because all the ‘New Year Goal Setting’ hype encourages us to grab those tiny little delicate seeds and push them right into the ground, dose them up on intensive fertiliser and start growing them quickly.

That’s what I did last year. Grabbed my little seeds (my 2023 intentions) and launched. A fatal mistake — I didn’t let them stay in liminal time long enough to gather the nutrients they needed to see themselves through a whole year of feast and famine. I went out January’s starting gates too quickly and by April my little seeds were withering.

My word count tracker — where I set a goal of writing 120,000 words between January and November 2023 (which I did manage to achieve) — charts the initial forced January rise and the March burnout (not a word written from March till May):

2023 was uncomfortable. Didn’t feel productive (as productive as I intended it to be). But it taught, or reinforced in, me the importance of the liminal — of not rushing through the in-between, dreamtime.

“New Year” for me, this year, has been about goal-receiving not goal-setting. It’s floating in in-between, uncomfortable, ambiguous, listening, not actioning time.

I’m watching the growing sense of determination building in me that 2024 is the year I’ll:

1. Complete the analysis of the Women of Ireland Project Interviews

2. Pursue and explore publishing routes for the Women of Ireland Project Book (i.e. I want a book deal!)

But I’m not ‘doing’ anything about them yet. Not until the daffodils come up and the lambs are born. Most of all though, I’m reflecting on how I want to approach doing this work this year. How I want to feel.

I recently read a piece that referenced poet Seamus Heaney and the analogy he used for his translation of Beowulf — which took him 20 years. He said, that to do it, he had to become a ‘settler’. To move in with the world of the poem, to settle down next to it and live alongside it, and in doing so, allow it to change him and him to change it.

I’m not comparing myself to Heaney and a work of such magnificence — but that analogy reverberated deeply.

That’s how I want to feel this year; settled. To be a settler. Because that’s how it is, we live alongside each other, this project and I. It lives in my home, in my head, it calls round for tea every day, and each time I complain we’re not going fast enough, it says “there’s time enough”.

There’s time enough to do it all. Settle down. Listen and watch. Don’t launch out the gates too fast.

Happy New Year xx