conversation is an engine

Welcome to Monday—what brings you here?

On your way to work—whether by train, plane or automobile (or stairs)—your mind raced ahead to anticipate the tasks needing attention. You passed by and through spaces not dedicated to the work you do: the incidental scenery along the way. Liminal spaces. Preoccupied with your onerous task (the meeting to conduct, the performance review, the estimate/report/files due by 11am), you may not have noticed those places. Anyway: aren’t they just the ugly, industrial infrastructure or detritus required to make the big commerce machine run?

Not really worth attention.

But those spaces have a way of releasing you and possibly preparing you for the very work you are doing just now. Those spaces—so regularly ignored as to become invisible—help your mind and body make the leap to the world of productivity. Moving forward through those spaces you shed thoughts and instincts from the weekend so you can adhere to hierarchy and care again about what your company cares about. Maybe those quickly-passing-spaces even erase the resolve and wonder built up over the weekend.

And welcome to Monday.

But it’s not good to forget lessons learned from the quiet of the weekend. Even hard-partying readers—I hope—found margin for reflection. Don’t leave those reflections and fresh understandings at home on the kitchen table. Bring them with you.

For me, a long conversation with this poet/psalmist has created a specific resolve that I hope will flow through this week. A boat-ride in the September sun and a story about a daughter in a far-away land cooking a Minnesota meal for the nationals—all these have a sort of sustaining power.

I’m eager to bring these with me into the week, right through the liminal spaces of my transit. In fact, now I wonder if the liminal spaces of experience are the very stuff of a full life.

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Image credit: Kirk Livingston