conversation is an engine

Movement toward “What next?”

A batch of colleagues lost their jobs in a fit of corporate downsizing. Smart, talented, loyal people who invested years are now asking “What next?”

Same old story for my generation. Happens all the time. Rarely pleasant.

I believe standing on the corner scratching your head and saying “Now what?” is a great place to be. Granted: few of us ever choose to go there. Most of us prefer what we’ve been doing. Even if we hate what we had been doing, it beats not knowing what’s next.

Over at Coracle Journeys, Judith Hougen has a lovely, timeless essay on liminal space—that place we move through when we leave the concrete and known and venture forward. Her entire essay is exceptional, short and worth the read:

Catholic priest and author Richard Rohr explains liminal space: “It is when you have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer….These thresholds of waiting and not knowing our ‘next’ are everywhere in life and they are inevitable. If you are not trained in how to hold anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you will run…anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing.”

Job loss is one step toward liminal space. It turns out there are many, many routes to the corner and “What now?” Graduating, moving to a new city, loss of relationship, aging. It’s a long list that parallels anyone’s list of top ten most stressful life events.

This “terrible cloud of unknowing” is only a distant, rumored threat when you are 19 and invincible. But each decade is a corner that provides more and closer glimpses of the cloud. It’s all part of the package deal that is the human condition.

Read the full essay at Coracle Journeys.

It will encourage you.

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Image credit: Alex Prager via 2headedsnake