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The Place That Is Neither Inside nor Outside
Some years ago, a few days before I was to attend the European Society for Medical Oncology congress with my graduate students, their applications for society membership were rejected in a batch. The reason was one thing: that my field was “physical education.” I was an invited speaker and a session chair at that congress, and yet even my own membership application came back within hours marked REJECTED. I was so upset I could not sleep. That night I set down this thought on Facebook.
If I just stayed in the field of physical education I would not suffer this humiliation. I could simply remain in my own field. … Member vs. non-member, insider vs. outsider.— 2023, Facebook
That place of belonging fully nowhere — I stood in it a long time. And yet, strangely, looking back, what changed me most was exactly that in-between time. Why should that be? Today I want to look for the answer in an old word: threshold.
The threshold is the wooden sill laid beneath a door. The moment of standing on that thin plank that is neither inside nor outside. The Latin limen means precisely this sill, and from it the word liminal was born. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep saw rites of passage as moving through three stages — separation, transition, incorporation — and Victor Turner attended to that middle stage of transition. Look closely at the rite by which a boy becomes a man and you find a strange time in the middle: a time when he is no longer a boy and not yet a man. A time standing on the threshold with name, status, and belonging stripped away for a while. Turner held that real change happens in exactly this liminal state — because taking off the old and putting on the new happens not in the safe interior but at the unsettling boundary.
The new is born not in the safe interior but at the unsettling boundary.
During my sabbatical in Boston my official title was “visitor.” I could enter Harvard’s libraries but I was not a person of Harvard. Someone who can go anywhere and belongs nowhere. Those years were very lonely. To have no affiliation means to have no wall holding you up. Yet because I belonged to neither of the two worlds, I could become someone who joined them. Because I stood between exercise science and medicine, I could carry exercise into the cancer ward.
This in-betweenness does not end with age. A few years ago at a colorectal surgery congress in Busan, leafing through the program book, I felt the same thing again after a long while. On the list of participants my affiliation alone stood out as incongruous — one exercise scientist among surgeons. And yet what I presented that day was a finding: that patients who had undergone colorectal cancer surgery and performed a prescribed exercise program were discharged a day or two earlier and, even during hospitalization, actually improved in leg strength. Patients who merely walked a great deal showed no such change. No one in that room could have produced that result alone. Only someone who knew both the language of surgery and the language of exercise physiology — clumsily, in both — could have asked that question.
A threshold can also be crossed. In my postdoctoral years in Boston, the diabetes center where I worked held a weekly seminar with an outside speaker. Sitting in the back row listening to Harvard Medical School professors present, I always had the same thought: might I one day stand up there?
Years later, one summer, I was deep into a book about dreams. I had even sent my students an email urging them to dream and to take on the challenge of realizing it. Not many days after that, I ran into a professor from that center by chance on the street. As we talked he said out of nowhere: come and give one of our seminars. Caught off guard, I said sure, why not, and we parted.
About a month later the invitation actually came. And not for some small gathering but for one of only eight talks in that series each term — the very place I had looked up at from the back row. I mailed my students again, boasting shamelessly. See? Dream and take the challenge and it becomes real.
In that room that day I was two people: the one who had sat in the back and dreamed, and the one standing at the front. That is what crossing a threshold is. The room had not changed; my place in that room had. And someone who has crossed once is a little less afraid before the next threshold.
Here lies the usefulness of the one standing on the threshold. He is an expert on neither side — and for that reason he can interpret. The person who speaks both rooms’ languages badly is the one who joins the two rooms.
That this usefulness does not stop at private consolation I confirmed at a lecture not long ago. Min Tae-gi, whose field is fluid mechanics, brought up William Herschel. The textbooks record him as the astronomer who discovered Uranus. Yet he was a musician who had written twenty-four symphonies, and it was as a musician that he was invited to a gathering of scientists, where he heard talk of telescopes, went off and built one himself, and, looking at the sky, found a new planet.
Not one line says he was a musician. William Herschel, the man who discovered Uranus, was a musician.— Min Tae-gi, “People Who Are Neither of the Humanities nor of the Sciences Change the World,” 2024
Herschel was not a member of astronomy’s household. And so, entering that room, he took the seat of one who learns, and did what those already inside did not trouble to do — build a telescope with his own hands. He saw something new not because he was more gifted but because he was not of that room. And what let him into the room was not astronomy but music. Here I see an order turned upside down. We assume one must first be recognized on the inside before one may cross a boundary. For him it was the reverse. The door leading in was not on the inside but at the boundary. That place where I always had to explain one line on a name badge was, in fact, the doorway.
In truth every birth passes a threshold. A child being born passes through the narrow boundary of the birth canal; a seed sprouting is the boundary-event of a shell splitting open. The threshold is uncomfortable. It is no place to remain long. But nothing whatsoever is born by skipping that discomfort. If you are standing now belonging to neither side, I hope you will not hate that anxiety too much. That place may be exactly where something is trying to be born. The strength to endure the threshold — that is another name for the health we will meet in the next chapter.
Notes for this chapter
Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage · Victor Turner, The Ritual Process · Min Tae-gi, lecture “People Who Are Neither of the Humanities nor of the Sciences Change the World” (Understanding, 2024)