Betwixt and between

These past few months have not gone to plan. For a few weeks my family’s health and wellbeing came before everything else. It was a good lesson, because a fair bit of what I’d told myself was urgent could wait. And the work that couldn’t wait was picked up by brilliant colleagues and friends who generously stepped in.

So when May, who’s been following Megan Reitz’s work, suggested we include Permission to Pause, her report with John Higgins, in our Spring newsletter, I read it closely. It runs to 90 pages and I won’t pretend I took in everything (my attention span is roughly that of a gnat these days). But the question at its centre has stayed with me: what does spaciousness at work, and in life, mean to you?

Here’s how Reitz and Higgins define it:

Spaciousness is an expansive and unhurried attention where we are neither grasping towards the next moment, nor running away from the previous one. We are aware of our interconnection with the world around us, free from the expectations of how we need to be and what needs to happen next, curious and open to potential.

I’m fairly good at the first half. I can feel the ties between people, places and the work.

The second half is where my work is. Free from the expectations of how I need to be and what needs to happen next. I’ve spent most of my career clear about what needs to happen next. It’s been useful, and some people have called it a superpower. But it’s also a habit, and habits can be hard to see from the inside.

Corridor or doorway

I’ve been thinking of our family as being in a transitional space. I’ve been in one myself for a while, building PRISM with May. My eldest is finishing Year 12 as I write this, and my youngest is at the end of Year 10. No longer children, not yet adults. This has been my most challenging phase as a parent so far. On paper, that’s a transition. But I’ve started to think the word is doing us a disservice.

William Bridges, who wrote the book on this, separates change (the thing that happens: a new job, a move, an illness in the family) from transition (the inner work of letting go of one version of yourself and taking up another). His model has three stages: an ending, a “neutral zone” and a new beginning. He knew the middle mattered. But the way we use the word now, a transition is a (ahem) journey. You’re going from somewhere to somewhere, and the whole way it’s “are we there yet?”

Liminal is an older idea. It comes from limen, Latin for threshold. The anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner used it for the middle of a rite of passage, when the old role has gone and the new one hasn’t been given yet. Turner called it being “betwixt and between”. It’s uncomfortable. It’s also where the old rules loosen enough for something new to form. Did I mention I have two teenagers?

Go back to the second half of Reitz and Higgins’ definition of spaciousness: “free from the expectations of how we need to be and what needs to happen next”. It sounds a lot like the threshold. A transitional mindset is always leaning towards what’s next, which is exactly the grasping the definition warns against. Lately, I’ve been treating this year like a corridor, something to get to the end of. The definition asks me to stand in the doorway for a while.

It made me think of the ending of Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s film of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel. (Spoilers ahead.) Agnes, brilliantly played by Jessie Buckley, has lost her son Hamnet. She and her husband, Will Shakespeare, grieve in completely different ways, and it almost breaks them. She stays with the loss at home; he goes back to London and to his writing. In the last scene Agnes watches Hamlet at the Globe and finally understands what Will has done with his grief. Only then can she let her son go, and Hamnet walks through the doorway. She couldn’t have hurried it. She had to stay in the in-between until she understood.

Bridges makes the same point more plainly: people rush the neutral zone because it feels unproductive, and end up rebuilding the old thing in a new place. I don’t want to do that with PRISM. And it certainly won’t work with the kids, as we move from parent and child to adult and adult.

Space for nothing in particular

Back to the report. It lists eight reasons we need space: to survive, be well, relate, develop, create, celebrate, transform and be human.

In my twenties we’d go away with friends with no agenda. We’d read, eat, drink, talk and do nothing much at all. Nobody asked what it was for. There were hours when nobody spoke, and times we laughed until we cried. There were big conversations and plenty of disagreements, and hopes, dreams and fears said out loud. I’ve missed that kind of space lately.

Most of the case for space at work leans on the useful reasons: better decisions, new ideas, people rethinking what success looks like. I make that case myself, and it’s sound. But the ones I miss are the ones that don’t produce anything. Be human. Celebrate. Relate. They were never meant to lead somewhere, and I think they’re what make the useful ones possible. The better decisions and new ideas tend to come out of time that wasn’t trying to produce them.

That kind of time doesn’t turn up by accident any more. It has to be booked, and then protected from morphing into work. It’s part of why we built our Community of Practice as a place to think together before it’s a place to plan.

So I’ll pass the question on. What does spaciousness at work, and in life, mean to you? And if you’d like company working it out, our Community of Practice will begin in the New Year and we’ll run a taster session in November.

You can register your interest here.

This blog is part of our continuing series What the Evidence, Expertise and Experience Says, edited by Courtney Collins.

Image: Y.ssk / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0