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The Place Neither Inside nor Outside
A few years ago, only days before I was to attend the European oncology congress (ESMO) with my graduate students, their applications for society membership were rejected in a single batch. The reason was one and the same: that I belonged to the field of "physical education." I was an invited speaker and a session chair at that very congress, yet even my own membership application came back within a few hours with the answer "REJECTED." I was so wounded that sleep would not come. That night I wrote these thoughts on Facebook.
If only I had simply stayed in physical education, I would not suffer such humiliation. If only I had remained within my own field. … Member vs. non-member, insider vs. outsider.— 2023, Facebook
That place where one belongs wholly nowhere—I stood in it for a long time. And yet, strangely, when I look back, it was precisely that awkward, in-between time that changed me the most. Why should that be? Today I want to seek the answer in an old word: the threshold.
The threshold is the wooden board laid beneath a door. The moment of standing on that thin plank that is neither inside nor outside. The Latin limen means exactly this threshold, and from it the word liminal was born. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep saw that a rite of passage moves through three stages—separation, transition, and incorporation—and Victor Turner fixed his attention on the middle stage, "transition." Look closely at the rite by which a boy becomes a man, and you find a strange interval at its center. A time when he is no longer a boy and not yet a man. A time of standing upon the threshold, stripped for a while of name, of rank, of belonging. Turner held that real change occurs precisely in this liminal state. For the shedding of the old and the putting on of the new happens not in the safe interior but at the anxious boundary.
The new is born not in the safe interior but at the anxious boundary.
When I spent my sabbatical in Boston, my official designation was "visitor." I could enter Harvard's libraries, but I was not a person of Harvard. Someone who could go anywhere yet belonged nowhere. Those days were terribly lonely. To be without belonging is to be without a wall to lean upon. And yet, because I belonged to neither of the two worlds, I could become the one who joined them. Because I stood between physical education and medicine, I could carry exercise into the cancer ward.
In truth, every birth passes through a threshold. A child's coming into the world is a passage through the narrow boundary of the birth canal, and a seed's sprouting is a boundary-event in which the husk bursts open. The threshold is uncomfortable. It is no place to linger. Yet nothing is ever born by skipping over that discomfort. If you find yourself now standing where you belong to neither side, I hope you will not hate that anxiety too much. That very place may be where something is about to be born. The strength to endure the threshold—that is another name for the health we will meet in the next chapter.
References
Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage · Victor Turner, The Ritual Process