Liminal: Intermediate between two states, conditions, or regions; transitional or indeterminate. This word is stalking me. It’s in news reports, music lyrics, the AARP magazine, and elsewhere. No! Everywhere!
Liminal resonates with me. Maybe because I’m part of Generation Jones, or because I have lived outside my home country for the majority of my life, or because I am croning—a significant state of transition.
Generation Jones? You ask. That cohort born between 1958 and 1964 which doesn’t really fit into the post-war Baby Boomers or their successors, Generation X. See, born liminal. My peers and I rarely identified with the Boomers. They were older than us, already having blazed glory in their youth and now settling down into disco and adult lives. We didn’t identify with GenX, although their music was awesome! We were dragged behind the Boomers like the little siblings we were, and that just never sat quite right. It wasn’t until social commentator Jonathan Pontell coined Generation Jones in the early 2000s that we finally found a generational home.
Maybe because I didn’t fit in “at home,” I jonesed for an international life even as a teen. Now, having lived around the world for my career in international development, working in 40 countries and travelling to another 37 for fun, I have spent little time in the US since university. Those who have spent time outside of their home culture know that very few people acculturate fully. It is more likely that one weaves between the main culture and a group of internationals who are sharing a similar experience. One lives in a liminal space of culture, language, and behaviors, all of which brings skills and tools. And, these are the juicy part of living abroad!
Now there’s the liminality of eldering. (I’m free-ranging linguistically here.) I have crossed the threshold of my 60’s. Actually, it was more like I stumbled over it. Like many women of my generation, I was used to being the only woman in the room or the only one of my seniority (organizationally speaking). Once in Azerbaijan, I was made an “honorary man” so that I could carry out interviews with a council of Meskhetian Turk elders. But being “old” was something new and I had no navigation tools or language.
I put on my big girl pants and got to work. I realized that I had taken on a tremendous amount of nonsense from western culture about aging. I realized that I believed much of what that inner critic had been toxifying my mind with. I had been living between what I was and what I could be. This is the beautiful part about becoming a crone. The examination of life is more self-compassionate, more understanding, more loving. And WOW! Does it feel great to move from the liminal space I’d occupied for too long into the brightness of a self-defined life.
Want some of that? Come join me at www.wondercrone.com!
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