Standing in Doorways

Why the most powerful room in your house isn't a room at all

My shoulder pressed against the wooden frame of my bedroom doorway, the grain catching slightly on my cotton t-shirt. Coffee mug warming my palms, the earthy scent rising to meet me. Neither fully in nor fully out. Just... suspended in this arbitrary rectangle between spaces.

It feels a bit weird to move out of this house after only being here 11 months.

Moving here felt like an ending, not a beginning. The closing chapter of my marriage. My past life. My past me.

But no matter what well-meaning friends insisted about "exciting new chapters" and "fresh starts," it never quite felt like the beginning of my new life either. Perhaps because the ending hadn't finished yet.

The divorce papers were signed, but the grief kept finding new expressions—in dreams where we were still together, in the reflexive reach for my phone to tell him something funny, in the muscle memory of cooking for two.

So I've been living in this strange, unnamed middle space. Not who I was. Not yet who I'll become.

Just... here.

Suspended in the doorway between two rooms of my life, watching the dust motes dance in the morning light, wondering when I would finally feel ready to fully step through.

The Unexpected Healing of Nowhere

Last Tuesday, as I was going through old things I was NOT going to take with me to my next place… I found a single forgotten sock—his sock—and sat on the floor holding it for what felt like hours.

Not crying.
Not thinking.
Just holding this physical evidence of a shared life now divided.

I'd been so careful during the first move, so methodical about separating our things. And yet, here was this small cotton reminder that you can never fully untangle two lives once they've been woven together.

The in-between feels like this—ordinary objects suddenly heavy with both memory and possibility.

Eleven months of healing in this liminal home. Eleven months of nights spent staring at unfamiliar ceiling cracks. Eleven months of slowly, painfully finding myself beneath the rubble of who I thought I was supposed to be.

This house was never meant to be permanent. Just a bandage over a wound, a temporary shelter. And yet, as I knelt on the floor that has absorbed my tears, my laughter, and my tentative steps toward wholeness, I realized something profound.

Maybe this doorway itself is the point.

Maybe thresholds aren't just the spaces between rooms.

Maybe they're rooms themselves.

Not merely paths from one defined space to another, but unique locations with their own power and purpose—spaces of transformation that we're too eager to hurry through.

The Uncomfortable Art of Being Unfinished

A typical visual representation of this journey. Credit thiago, licensed through Adobe Stock.

Our culture really hates the in-between, doesn't it?

We're told to "move on" from grief. To "get over" heartbreak. To "find closure" after loss. aAs if these messy human experiences come with convenient off-switches, or neat little bows we can tie once we've properly completed them.

Just look at how we talk about uncertainty:

"I'm in limbo." "I'm at a crossroads." "I'm going through a phase."

These aren't neutral descriptions. They're diagnoses. Problems to solve. Conditions to treat.

The subtext is always clear: this isn't a place to stay.

I've tried to "productivity hack" my way through this transition, as if enough checklists and vision boards could teleport me to the next stable chapter. The universe seems to find this particularly amusing. 😬

Even our stories reflect this obsession with clarity. We crave the resolution, the answered question, the neatly-tied ending. We want the hero to defeat the villain, win the love interest, and ride triumphantly into the sunset.

Rarely (if ever) are stories told about the hero who is still figuring things out, who is halfway through the journey, and who is honestly not sure where they're going anymore. We don’t celebrate the sacred space of confusion, of metamorphosis, of becoming.

But what if our desperate rush to escape these in-between spaces is robbing us of their unique wisdom? What if doorways aren't just paths between significant places, but the most significant places of all? Not merely the space between chapters, but the surprising plot twists where the real story happens?

The Magic That Lives Between Definitions

Have you ever noticed how people instinctively pause when crossing thresholds? That slight hesitation before entering a party, the half-step slowing before walking into a meeting? Our bodies understand something about doorways that our minds have forgotten.

Last month, I watched a child play a game where the floor was lava and only the doorways were safe. She'd leap from one threshold to another, calling them "magic portals."

I wonder when we stopped seeing doorways as magical and started seeing them as just gaps to hurry through.

In anthropology, the concept of liminality (from the Latin word "limen," meaning threshold) describes the ambiguous spaces where we have left one state but have not yet entered another.

The teenager who's no longer a child but not yet an adult.
The person in the middle of a career change.
The widow who's learning to redefine herself beyond her partnership.
Me, standing in this doorway, between houses, between identities, between stories.

Your threshold might look nothing like mine. Perhaps it's the space between diagnosis and treatment. Between application and acceptance. Between loving someone and letting them go.

The geography differs, but the disorientation—and the potential—feels universal.

These liminal spaces can feel excruciating precisely because they're undefined. We can't google "how long does it take to become yourself again after divorce" and get a definitive answer. There's no progress bar showing how far along we are in our transformation.

But within this very uncertainty lives a particular kind of magic.

When you're not fully defined, you're also not fully limited.

When The Rules No Longer Apply

I remember the first few weeks after moving here. Everything felt simultaneously heavy with grief and strangely weightless. My routines were disrupted. My identity, in flux.

The air in the house seemed to vibrate with a quiet question: Who will you be now?

One evening, I found myself singing at the top of my lungs while cooking dinner. My wooden spoon became an impromptu microphone, and steam from the pasta fogged up the kitchen window as my voice bounced off unfamiliar walls. I hadn't sung like that in years.

The next day, I signed up for a pottery class I'd been curious about forever. My hands met clay for the first time, cool and resistant at first, then yielding as I learned its language. Later that week, I struck up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop—me, an introvert who usually guards his space like a dragon hoarding gold.

It wasn't that I suddenly became a different person. It was that the usual constraints of "who I am" had temporarily loosened. In the doorway between my old self and whatever came next, I found room to stretch, to reach, to try on different ways of being.

The rules of the previous room no longer applied. The rules of the next room hadn't been written yet.

And this experience isn't unique to personal upheaval. Across cultures and throughout history, humans have recognized the power of thresholds.

Wisdom from the In-Between

In Japanese traditional architecture, the engawa is a wooden strip of flooring that runs around the perimeter of a house. Neither fully inside nor fully outside—it's both and neither. This intentional liminal space serves as a crucial transitional zone where inside meets outside, where private meets public.

The Japanese don't rush through this space. They recognize it as valuable in itself—a place to sit, observe, contemplate.

I found this out accidentally on a research trip to Tokyo years ago. I was rushing around like a typical brash (and young) American. I had stuff to do, people to interview, focus groups to focus. I walked straight through our host's engawa without a second thought.

He asked me to return and meet him at the threshold. His face betrayed no anger; instead, it displayed patience. I was smart enough to realize I had committed a faux pas, but I was not quite sure what I had done.

He invited me to sit and have tea with him, to witness the world here, eyes wide open, and to see if I found something unique within the threshold.

I did.

The shadows played differently there. The sounds of the home mingled with the sounds of the world, and tea tasted different when sipped from this threshold perspective.

That lesson stayed with me, though I've only recently begun to truly understand it. Sometimes, we need guides to show us the power of spaces we've been conditioned to hurry through.

Celtic tradition speaks of "thin places" where the boundary between ordinary reality and the mystical world grows permeable. These weren't places to avoid or hurry past—they were sacred sites specifically sought out for spiritual connection. Places where the veil between worlds thinned enough to touch what usually remains hidden.

Timelapse of Gaulstown Dolmen on a windy day, but notice the almost bubbling of time, where the wind doesn’t quite touch everything. Video credit: BlackBoxGuild, licensed through Adobe Stock.

We all experience these threshold states in our daily lives. Think of the space between waking and sleeping, when your mind wanders into its most creative territories. That floating sensation where logic loosens and images bloom in unexpected combinations. How often have you had your best ideas just as you were drifting off to sleep?

Or that feeling when you're on vacation, temporarily suspended between your regular life and a different way of being. How food tastes more vivid, how colors seem more saturated, how time moves by different rules entirely. You're neither fully your "home self" nor someone new—you exist in a beautiful in-between where different parts of you can emerge.

These liminal states often produce our most original ideas, our deepest insights, our most authentic expressions.

And yet we rarely give them the reverence they deserve.

Standing in the Doorway, On Purpose

For so long, I've been trying to "get through" this transition. To reach that mythical point where I'll feel completely settled in my new identity, where all the grief is processed, where the lessons are learned, and the growth is complete.

I've been treating the doorway as a place to pass through, not a place to stand.

But what if I stopped rushing? What if I actually planted my feet here, looked around, and asked: what can I see from this unique vantage point that I couldn't see from either the room behind me or the room ahead?

What if the doorway itself isn't just legitimate? What if it's essential?

I tried an experiment this week. Each time I passed through a literal doorway in my house, I paused for just a second. Not long—just a momentary acknowledgment of this in-between space.

The threshold to my bathroom, with its slight dip where thousands of footsteps have worn the wood. The kitchen doorway, where the temperature shifts and the scent of yesterday's dinner still lingers faintly. The front door, where outside light spills in patterns across the entryway floor.

I started to notice things:

• how the acoustics change exactly at the boundary line,

• how my body instinctively adjusts its posture as I transition between spaces,

• and how the doorway itself frames a completely unique view that vanishes the moment you step through.

It made me wonder what else I'm missing by always hurrying through transitions, by treating them as spaces to traverse rather than spaces to inhabit.

The Beautiful Ambiguity of Now

I'm starting to think that maybe all of life is liminal. That "closure" and "certainty" are comforting illusions we create to feel better about the fundamental ambiguity of being alive.

Every moment is a threshold between what was and what will be.

Every conversation contains the ghost of previous exchanges and the seeds of future ones.

Every decision closes some doors and opens others.

We're always in process, always becoming, always in translation between one state and another.

And rather than making me feel unstable, this realization has become strangely comforting. If liminality isn't a temporary condition but the very nature of existence, then I don't need to rush through it.

I can settle into it, explore it, and even find beauty in it.

Maybe that's what it means to be fully present—not to achieve some perfect state of resolution, but to stand willingly in life's doorways, attentive to the unique perspective they offer.

Finding Your Own Threshold Wisdom

So, as I prepare to move again, packing up the short chapter that was this house, I'm trying to approach this transition differently. Not as an inconvenient disruption before "real life" starts again. Not as a problem to be solved.

But as a doorway worth standing in. A threshold with its own gifts to offer. A sacred in-between space where, just maybe, I'll catch glimpses of myself that wouldn't be visible from anywhere else.

The sock I found under the bed is now sitting on my nightstand. Not as a painful reminder, but as a small, temporary monument to the threshold I'm standing in. Neither attached to its meaning from the past nor erased for the future. Just acknowledging this is where I am.

This peculiar, powerful, in-between place.

I'm learning to tell myself: Don't rush. Don't look away. This unfinished, undefined moment has something to show you.

Tomorrow morning, I invite you to find a doorway in your home. Stand in it for three full breaths. Notice what you can see from this vantage point that you couldn't see from either room. This is your life's liminal wisdom speaking—what is it trying to tell you?

Maybe the most powerful room in your house isn't a room at all.

About Alex

I’m equal parts old soul and curious wanderer, a farmer boy at heart, and a writer whenever I can corral my ADHD. Ultimately, I write for those who crave rest in a world that never pauses.

As a political psychologist, yoga therapist, and integrative coach—anchored by both research and lived experience—I delve into questions of identity, connection, and wholeness, which are the foundation of my Substack publication, Life as I See It.

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