Thresholds

We humans need a year to end and the accompanying start of a new one. In nature too Winter gives way to  Spring. There’s Birth and Death. Start and Finish. Sunrise and Sunset.

These are all thresholds of sorts. And these are the more obvious ones; the ones we consciously anticipate and experience and hopefully have the chance, wisdom and time to plan for.

A new year especially gives us a chance to try again. To start over. To leave things behind and to begin anew in this brand new unlived space consisting of another 365 and a quarter (I think) days.

But there are also the more subtle doorways during the course of one’s life. When we move form one stage to another not really aware that we have stepped over a threshold.

It is often only in retrospect that one realises this. Or notices this in others.

The period of my  driving kids to school—a whopping 21 years - has just ended with the event of my youngest son becoming the proud owner of a driver’s license and  his very first set of wheels.

We have both crossed a threshold: he into the freedom that comes with being able to drive himself around, but with the accompanying responsibilities of which he can be hardly aware at this stage. And I into a whole new phase, also of freedom, but with the accompanying  letting go that we mothers find so very hard to do.

In some sense it feels as if we have met each other on the same threshold, going in opposite directions. 

Even more vague  is the shift in consciousness that occurs when something major happens in our lives: when we suffer great loss, experience trauma , or, on the opposite end of the scale, but just as life changing, fall deeply in love.

These happenings feel rather more like  long corridors leading to a whole new view on life.

The trip to Prague doesn’t fall in any of these categories. It wasn’t  anticipated and very hurriedly planned. It also wasn’t a clear ending of a phase and the stepping into a new one. 

The trip to Prague, was the trip to Prague. No more and no less. And yet it was a threshold.  The watershed that we anticipated it to be.

It serves as an example of a threshold that has one groping around in the dark, not sure whether we have stepped out of someplace outlived and into the openness of the new, or whether we have stepped into someplace safe  and warm from out of the cold.

It feels like both. Which means that out in the open is in from the cold!

We are learning to live with paradoxes on this journey, but we are waiting for the fog to clear on this one.

Slowly we are beginning to see: it’s only a hunch, but it seems that this is going to be a Happening year. And not just by our own doing.

Matilda

Archway in Old Prague

Malostranska side of the Charles bridge

Door of the St. Vitus Cathedral