The In‑Between Time
Renovation, aging, and the unseen work that manifests change
I am living in the hallways of life right now.
It’s work for me to stay grounded in our current home, a wonderful exposed timber house on the edge of the Black Forest that holds me close in ways that have been deeply comforting in both good and troubled times.
We’re not anywhere close to being in the future one yet. I’m not the woman I was twelve years ago when we came here; I’m not yet the woman I will become in that home either. In German this is die Zwischenzeit, the in‑between time, and I feel the word’s meaning in my bones because change is something I recognize as inevitable.
Just after Easter, we’ll head back to Italy. This holiday of renewal reminds me something has to close in order for something new to open. Down in Murazzano, the builders will have been busy changing the house — but the truth is, a deeper evolution is underway in places I can’t photograph. Liminal spaces are thresholds, uncertain zones where you’ve left one shore but haven’t yet arrived at the next.
This is the part no restoration show tells: the not‑knowing, the days when you’re neither in the old story nor the new one.
All doors are thresholds, the psychological ones and the physical ones, bringing us from one stage set to the next. I try to cross these liminal thresholds by staying focused on the next task, then the next. Sometimes that works. I tend to be a worker bee, thinking that if I just put the pedal to the metal firmly enough I’ll arrive on the other side whole.
Which I won’t. I know this, because I’ve never arrived in a new situation whole. There will be challenges, and adjusting to newness at this age looks radically different than it did 12 years ago, or 22 or 32 years ago.
But in my not wholeness I will know that’s an illusion, and it will go away, and I will feel my wholeness again, after the boxes are unpacked and the first fire of the season is lit in the wood burning stove.
I remember sitting on the empty living room floor of my house in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, the moving company having swiped everything up to put on a boat for Hamburg, thinking, I cannot ever do this again. No more massive changes. I was 35. That was 32 years ago.
Little did I know what I was actually capable of. My life became a series of in‑between times, adrenaline‑pumping events, “oh my God how are we going to fucking do this” moments that have left me enormously satisfied with the journey. I managed, through no real strategic plan, to find the perfect partner with whom to travel this intrepid road, and have not just survived, but thrived, in ways I never would have thought possible for myself.
And it continues. I’m not quite sure where or how this journey will go — this one back to Italy, to a new town, a new vibe, a new way of living — but I am optimistic, a characteristic that has never been my strong suit. Living in this space of planning and waiting, I feel suspended in air in a good way. I’ve been here before, and I’ve made friends with the liminal part of the journey.
In essence, it’s the spaces in between that are the rich cloud of curiosity which bind the storied layers of life.
I wonder about you: where are the hallways in your own life right now, the thresholds you’re standing on but haven’t yet stepped through?
I love this metaphor. I am also in the hallways of life, trying (and lately failing) to establish roots in a new place while still having my belongings boxed up in storage in the old. But the hallways are where we get to choose which room to enter while admiring the artwork, the photos, the views along the way.
This is such a rich metaphor, Diana. I feel that all of us are living in a hallway right now, as the world is transforming into something that it hasn't yet been (at least, not in the lifetimes of any of us currently alive). Being in my early 60s has me feeling in a corridor, too. Yeah, I cannot manage change the way I could 12 years ago, either. I feel myself walking from middle age to old. And yet, even in the hallway, we are still alive, this is life, too. I try to remember that every day. Thank you for the invitation to sit with all of this for a few minutes this morning.