There Are No Liminal Fairy Tales
We as individuals and as a society are very uncomfortable with the liminal state: The state where we know what isn’t right for us, but don’t yet know what is. When all we know, as Elizabeth Gilbert* says, is “not this”.
Glennon Doyle is the American author of one of the biggest bestsellers of 2020, “Untamed”, a book about her decision to live life more fully. This led her to divorce the father of her children and marry another woman, who just happened to be world-class soccer player Abby Wambach. Much of what she writes about isn’t related to that happy ending, but we may not have been quite as excited to read a book with the backstory “a woman leaves her broken marriage because she deserves a better life, but isn’t sure what she’ll do next”. “A woman leaves her broken marriage to live happily ever after with the remarkable true love of her life” sounds so much more interesting.
Hearing about people voluntarily entering a liminal state makes us feel uneasy. It’s a story without an ending. Unless they’re escaping a negative or harmful situation, we expect them to figure out the destination before taking the first step. The discomfort is compounded when it’s our own story: How can we have our hero’s journey if we can’t define our quest? No fairy tale or adventure story ever talks about people meandering aimlessly - unless they’re about to meet a big bad wolf. We’re programmed to think we always need to know where we’re going or we’ll never get anywhere.
In our social and personal discomfort, we miss the power of quiet aimlessness. The boredom of going nowhere sharpens our ability to spot a tiny sign, a small spark of curiosity about something that we would never have noticed otherwise. The sense of having nothing to lose by exploring that spark. And the potential for this exploration to inspire big revelations. Instead of “what’s my purpose?” or “what’s my destination?”, we can ask, “what am I aimlessly curious about?”
The road less traveled doesn’t tell us where it’s leading. And as Robert Frost said, that makes all the difference.
* Elizabeth Gilbert is best known as the author of the blockbuster “Eat, Pray, Love”. I much prefer her book “Big Magic”, which I’ve gifted multiple times to people who want to explore their creative interests. She is one of my role models for living an authentic life, completely true to herself.
Found this post interesting? Subscribe at the bottom of this page to receive new posts by email.
