Come in or go out, but don’t stand in the doorway!

Earlier this summer, I found myself driving through the beautiful Indiana countryside, surrounded by fields of corn standing nearly three metres high.

I’m still a little in awe whenever I drive through vast stretches of countryside. I think about the work of farmers, the patience required to grow anything, and how quietly their labour feeds the rest of us.

Yet before long, that corn will be harvested. The fields will look bare, the landscape will adjust, and another season will begin to emerge. Nothing in nature remains exactly as it is.

Harvesting is also an act of separation. The kernels are removed from the cob, while the stalks and husks that carried and protected them are left behind. What served the grain in one season does not necessarily accompany it into the next.

Perhaps something similar happens in our own lives.

We enter threshold moments, those times when we are no longer where we were, but have not quite stepped into what comes next.

A threshold is the strip beneath a doorway. 

And if you grew up in an Irish house, you’ll know that a doorway is no place to settle. Stand there too long, and someone will eventually shout:

“Would you come in or go out, and stop letting the heat out of the house!”

Yet we do this so often in life.

We linger between what has been and what could be. We know a season has ended, but we’re reluctant to release the things that belonged to it. We wait in the doorway, hoping for certainty before taking the next step.

Change is constant in nature, and so it is in us.

In yesterday’s podcast episode, I explored these threshold moments through the opening chapter of The Imaginal Coach: why we linger, what may need to be released, and how we begin stepping towards the life that is trying to emerge.

If you find yourself standing in a doorway at the moment, I hope you’ll have a listen here.

And consider asking yourself: What has served its purpose, and what might be waiting for me on the other side of the door?