In Praise of Liminal Time

I write in praise of liminal time, and of the limitless riches it can offer. 

First, a confession. As a poet and chronic misfit, liminality is my preferred territory in life: liminal places such as the coastline, or the porousness of sacred ground. Liminal careers, slipping in between full-time academia and the restless writer’s life. A liminal life; a long-time solitary, through married for the last ten years; an only child, without children of my own. My childlessness makes it harder to mark the passing of time as I move towards later life. The children of friends mushroom from infancy to young adulthood in what feels to me like a collapsed turn of a kaleidoscope. Years can slip by very quickly, especially after one’s half-century. The pandemic has only exacerbated this sensation of time’s exponential slide. As my aunt, now in her late seventies, but who I still think of as a glamorous woman keen on red wine and rock music, confides to me: ‘the years, now, pass by like months.’ Moreover, the finite nature of the human span is very much more apparent. With a slight further defocussing of my perceptions, I can view the term of a human life itself as little more than liminal. 

But let me reel back a little bit. 

I am about ten years old, and my parents have taken me on a package holiday to Spain. I am recovering from my first airplane flight in which my eardrums howled with the increased air pressure and the boiled sweets given to me by an air hostess have flavoured the whole voyage with a prolonged tang of pain. Now we are in a hotel lobby, waiting to go to our room. I am overwhelmed by Mediterranean heat and the orange colours of a continental summer. I am ready to claim my bed, which will be a hastily assembled camp bed in an otherwise standard double room; but it will be my place. I have with me dolls and colouring books to play with. My father might let me play with the disposable camera he has bought me for our holiday, a fabulous little blue box which will somehow be able to house a very small number of precious Spanish images. These are my promised holiday Things to Do.

But for now, we are in limbo. My mother returns from the hotel reception, her blonde hair swept back from her face by a thick Alice band, and her complexion pink and shining. 

‘They’re just doing the room,’ she says. ‘Only twenty minutes.’ Then she turns to me and says, ‘Cheer up! Twenty minutes is no time at all!’ My father wonders off in search of a sickly mint cordial that he claims to be his favourite Spanish drink. Sat on the scratchy fabric of a hotel lobby chair, I reassure myself that twenty minutes is, just as my mother tells me, no time at all. 

Twenty minutes. It is the first time I have attempted to quantify this familiar temporal term. Five minutes in, with the stuffy heat in the lobby only increasing in intensity, I realise that my mother is very wrong. Twenty minutes, for a fatigued and overstimulated ten-year-old child, is tantamount rather to an eternity. I emerge, finally, from this interminable stretch with the heavy sense of a lesson learned. 

It feels so strange to think of a mere twenty minutes like this now. As does another memory from about the same time. This one a passive memory, watching television, with the uninterrupted intensity of a child left to their own devices in some family sitting room. The Rockford Files is on, one of my favourites, although I have any number of adult TV series as favourites, most of which I enjoy on the level of music and humour and seeing the car wheels during chases magically spin backwards (my father, who works as a television broadcast engineer, pointed this televisual anomaly out to me with some pride). This particular episode opens with James Rockford taking a mysterious phone call from someone full of threats and secrets. Rockford has one hour to solve a kidnap case, or to facilitate the outrageous ransom demands, or – well, gruesome murder would ensue. He slams down the phone and the high-action soundtrack lets me know the urgency of the case. 

The funny thing is, I can’t comprehend why there is any urgency at all. An hour! To a child of ten or so, this is practically forever. In a similar way, to a child, school is a life sentence. One knows that it will end by one’s late teens, but this is a theoretical issue only, rather like the end of the galaxy, our sun swelling to a red giant and then a white dwarf. 

Aged eleven, I am sitting in a late morning lesson with our teacher, Mr Carpenter, hesitant to let us out before the large, white, classroom clock ticks its way to twelve noon precisely. There are two or three minutes to go, the second hand progressing agonisingly slowly across the blank brow of the clock-face.

‘Just think,’ says Mr Carpenter. ‘If the time was ticking away to your midday execution, how quickly it would be going.’ I realise with horror that he is right. Time is entirely relative. This shocking insight still ticks away in my memory. But now I’m going to circle round like the black hands of the clock and talk about woman’s time, which I discover as I enter my teenage years.

It’s a theoretical term, coined by French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva in the 1970s. But you don’t need to be a French feminist theorist to understand the concept. Woman’s time highlights the rhythms of the female body, the monthly round of menstruation and the potential for conception, gestation, and birth. Woman’s time acknowledges bodily cyclicity. It is all rounds and curves, the heavy swell of breast and belly, the fleurs-de-lys of ovaries. The concept of cyclicity isn’t exclusive to female biology of course: we all have our circadian rhythms. Our world turns, orbiting our blazing sun and each year spirals through its seasons. One can argue that the days themselves are a twenty-four hour roundabout we rarely step back from. But the visceral monthly cadences of woman’s time counterpointing everyday linear time shouldn’t be underestimated. Woman’s time can easily squeeze liminal time into nothing, although this isn’t inevitable. 

The spin-cycle of woman’s time has left me behind for good now. Ordinary time simply advances. My rediscovery and relishing of liminal time has been concomitantly precious, providing another fundamental counterpoint to the clock. Let me give you some examples. 

The obvious ones first. Those moments, minutes – occasionally hours – between night and day; the times of dusk and dawn, which are of little practical or economic potential. You are awake and likely alone. These times are liminal, luminous, and valuable for the sheer fact that one can fill them with nothing but one’s breath. One does not do, but be. An entirely new perception of time is able to bloom. Even twenty minutes can seem like an eternity, as my ten-year old self found out. But consciously dwelling in liminal time in later life is a different experience. It brings a sensation of expansion and relaxation into time that is rare in our grownup productivity-obsessed culture. It breaks the capitalist stranglehold on our waking hours, long-embedded in our collective western culture. 

I am fourteen and my girl’s High School has arranged a stop-start series of careers talks. This afternoon a man has come from Norwich Union, the county’s major finance and insurance company. Already fancying myself destined for the writing life, I sit through his exposition of grind culture without honestly taking much notice. The man, who wears a tight brown jacket and thick square glasses, impresses upon us the key to his company’s success.

‘The lights are always on at Norwich Union. We have a dayshift that goes directly into a nightshift. Remember this, girls: Time is Money, and Money is Time.’

Time is Money, and Money is Time. The unhappy chiasmus lodges itself in my mind. Afterwards, I come to prefer other mantras that offer deeper riches, and other, non-profit, temporal concepts. Liminal time is time outside monetary exchange; it does not constitute a billable hour, although liminal time can bring its own, subtler, riches. Beside their invitation to breathe and simply exist, I find these dawn and dusk hours to be latent wellsprings of creativity, particularly for poetry, that intrinsically liminal art. Poetry requires little equipment, just a notebook and pen, or laptop, and a cup of tea as the light blooms or dwindles. I know there is not long: this is not tantamount to a working day. This allows me to dip in a hand, to take a sip from the spring of myself, to access its waters and swim – or simply paddle – in their creative flow. Currently dusk is my time to write; dawn is my time to unfurl in the early quiet. 

Then there is liminal time you carve out for itself. These are the breathers between tasks or phases of your day however that pans out for you. They may be presented to you – a coffee break at work, a ten-minute wait for a bus or to pick up a prescription. But for optimal personal liminal time you will probably have to be proactive in procuring them. Your self-carved sessions of liminal time may coincide with nature’s own liminality of sunrise and sunset, but they may not. I have to say that for me, the self-selected dedication of a couple of liminal periods of everyday feels increasingly like a life-saver. And ironically enough, if you can establish a twenty-minute liminal zone once or twice a day, it’s likely you will start to reap the benefits of this ‘non-profit’ discipline in no time at all.

Twenty minutes? Twenty minutes. The chosen portion for the transcendental meditator (which I am not). Ironic, considering the petulant resistance of my ten-year-old self. Now, while occasionally I cavil at my self-allocated moments in the temporal wilderness, more often I approach a liminal twenty-minute period as though it were a miraculous oasis in a burning, arid land. 

Hermits still live in our coastal outposts here in the UK and Ireland. As a young woman, I watch, through synchronicity, a documentary about modern hermits. The camera follows a woman consecrated to this ancient form of religious life as she walks in the liminal wilderness until reaching a flat rock, upon which she sits, pulling her hermit’s hood over her head and sinking into prayer’s profound stillness. The image lodges in my soul, substantially displacing that unholy mantra of the man from Norwich Union. I discover that sitting for a liminal twenty minutes is metaphorically tantamount to pulling up my hermit’s hood. And here’s an accompanying figure of speech I find immensely helpful when entering liminal time, no matter how short the available period: to dip into liminal time is to ‘unhook your self-project’, a phrase I learned from a friend who was a monk for twenty years. The ensuing sense of unhooked weightlessness compliments the echo of eternity that twenty minutes or less of liminal time can offer. Another contemplative speaker I know recommends that we cultivate an interior ‘swing door’; an inner portal that doesn’t take much forcing but is a welcome refuge from on-the-clock demands. 

You may be surprised by the dimensions of the cell on the other side of the door. Twenty minutes can be a place. So can five. 

It’s bigger on the inside. Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. The liminal is after all, literally, a threshold or portal. In the linear world, timetables are predictable and limited; so is the body and its cyclical concerns. To step through the portal is unremarkable, but its uncharted hinterland is vast. Liminal time is, paradoxically, a foretaste of the limitless. It can almost feel like home. But perhaps, on some level, you knew this all along.