flomotion coaching

Here to There: It's About the Journey

Quick, think back to middle school geometry class. No, not the part when you got your tongue stuck in your braces after you finally got the courage to talk to the guy you had a crush on all year.

I’m talking course content, the part about how the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

That tiny bit of brilliance likely served you well on a whole bunch of standardized tests.

In real life, it comes in handy if you’re measuring a room for carpeting or fabric for curtains or some similarly domestic undertaking. (As one who’s been known the hem slacks with adhesive tape – just in a pinch – I wouldn’t know.)

When you’re dealing with significant real-life transitions, though, you can forget that shortest-distance, straight-line thing – just like you forgot about how to conjugate irregular verbs in the pluperfect – because it’s highly unlikely to work out that way.

Here: crummy, soul-sucking job. Point A.

There: meaningful, fulfilling, lucrative new job or business of your own. Point B.

Navigate a straight line from Here to There. Live happily ever after. Simple, right?

Except stuff happens.

Leaving Here is scarier than you thought.

Saving enough money for a cushion while you head over There takes longer than you ever imagined.

Suddenly Here doesn’t look so crummy or soul-sucking. Until it does.

You consider Way Over There instead of There.

You get more training, That Corner Over There.

You try something totally different, Somewhere Out There.

But There still calls.

So you keep moving toward it, not in one straight line, but through a series of them.

And you come to enjoy the journey.

Because in real life, it’s not about the shortest distance between points.

It’s about the most wonderful route.

Feeling stuck between Here and There?

I can help you create your There and craft a journey toward it that’s way more fun than staying stuck all by yourself.

Email ( flomo null@null flomotioncoaching NULL.com) me to schedule a free, 30-minute Check-It-Out Call.

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I’ve always been fascinated with littoral spaces, the physical in-between places near a shore, especially the seashore.

Liminal spaces, their emotional and temporal counterpart, not so much.

My love of kayaking is fed as much by quietly exploring the marshes – littoral spaces accessible only when the tide is just right – as by frantically paddling hard against a strong current.

When facing a life transition, though, going directly from before to after while avoiding the in-between – those ambiguous, unstructured, messy-feeling liminal spaces – would suit me just fine.

Here are some liminal times that unnerved me. Maybe you’ve been in similar places.

• The days between my last final exam and college graduation felt awkward and uncomfortable. No longer a student, but not yet a graduate. And not even close to being productively employed. Excited about the next step, sad to be leaving people and a place I’d come to love, anxious about launching a career when the job market was bleak.

• The weeks between finding my first house – after months of searching, I knew it was the right one before I even got out of the car – and making settlement were similarly unnerving. I was grateful to have time to work out the countless logistical details of getting myself and the house ready for the move even as I resisted facing the emotional and psychological aspects of my new role of homeowner.

• The year between the day I decided to quit teaching to finish grad school and the one when I packed up my classroom and drove home from school for the last time seemed like a lifetime. Not the flash-before-your-eyes-in-a-instant sort of lifetime, either. I knew the time was right to finish my degree, but that year was like riding a merry-go-round of worries about paying the bills on my part-time music gig, sadness about leaving a really terrific group of students, and excitement about immersing myself in full-time study in a place I adored.

Transitions, changes that evolve over time, are inevitable. Necessary. Generally good.

Always good, when you find the perfection in them.

So are the liminal spaces within those transitions.

Inevitable. Necessary. Good. Maybe not easy, but good.

Perfect, even.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned about how to change liminal spaces from times to dread into times to explore, connect, and thrive.

In the meantime, I invite you to consider the times you’ve been in-between, how you’ve dealt with them, and what they’ve taught you, and I’d be delighted if you’d share them in the comments.

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