When encountering thresholds, we often talk as if our work is that of successfully “passing through” them.  We speak of “making healthy transitions.”  We seek out advice and support as we decide which thresholds to lean into and which to resist.  The goal, it would seem, is figuring out how to travel forward in the right way.

But what if the true invitation of a threshold is not to successfully move from here to there, but instead to just sit and pause?  What if we saw thresholds as resting places rather than as those moving walkways that transport us through airports? What if thresholds help us “become” by asking us to just “be” for a while?  No moving.  Just noticing and naming.  Less traveling and more listening. 

We find ourselves in a liminal time, a threshold time.  We know where we have come from, and we know a pandemic threatens.  Many of us fear to cross the threshold.  We’re safe in our homes.  Out there?  Not so much.

And yet, as the Rev Sara LaWall writes, “A [threshold is] a space to imagine a new way, and new self. Not moving or pushing but sitting and cultivating … [the goal] is to allow you space and time to reflect on your past, present, and future.  To imagine a new beginning…”

What if this time could be a time of imagining and naming in ways maybe more powerful than we usually assume.  From the outside, it may seem that nothing has changed in our lives, and yet once that imaging takes shape in our minds and hearts, nothing is ever the same.  The idea, the dream, the recognition suddenly takes on gravity.  And that gravity creates an inevitability that transforms us, sometimes whether we like it or not.

Here’s how the writer Gary Zukav puts it, “At that moment [of realization], a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable … Once that realization has emerged, you can either honor it or ignore it, but you cannot forget it.  What has become known can not become unknown again.”

There is, after all, no forgetting it.  Only living it.  And letting it live in us.