How to Live in Liminality (Pandemic Edition)

Liminality can be defined as a time of transition. It comes from the latin word Limin, which means threshold. 

So if you stood in a doorway, you’d be in a liminal space, because you’re not in the room you just left, but you’re also not yet in the room you’re going into. You’re paused in a space between the past and the future, the old and the new.

The pandemic has put us all into a liminal space for over a year, but I also think there are two distinct liminal spaces within this experience. 

We entered a liminal space when lockdown started, but then we settled into pandemic life at some point and got used to it (whether we liked it or not). Now, we’re in a new liminal space as certain parts of the world begin to open up. We’re preparing to transition from pandemic life to post-pandemic life.

Liminality can be uncomfortable because our old, familiar life is partially gone, and we don’t yet know what our new life will be like.

So how do we live in this weird, uncomfortable liminal space, knowing that the transition to post-covid life is going to take a while?

Release your pandemic stress now. 

You likely have some stress stuck in your body, even if you don’t realize it. Stress and emotions can get stuck inside of us if we don’t complete the process of moving it through us. The best ways to move emotions through and out of us, is through physical activity and to allow ourselves to fully feel the emotion instead of resisting it.

Create a vision for your ideal post-pandemic life. 

What do you want to keep from your life before, what do you want to keep from your pandemic life? And what new things do you want in your life, post-covid? Dream of all the possibilities of what you can create for yourself now. 

At the beginning of lockdown, people talked a lot about using this time to think about our life, our values and reflecting on how we can do more self-care, as well as using this time to become the people we want to be after this experience. 

And then, people stopped talking about that right around the time we all settled in and got used to our new WFH lives. But now is the perfect time to start asking those questions again! We’ve all changed so much through this experience, it’s worth it to reflect on who we are now and what matters to us, because it’s likely a little different than it was at the start of the pandemic. 

In liminality, we can choose to fear the uncertainty, or we can choose to play with the possibilities in front of us. How will you use this time?