East West

Looks in between

Dr..

Kamal Abdul Malik

05 August 2022

Have you ever asked yourself where would you be if you stood on your doorstep?

Are you inside or outside your home?

Is the threshold part of it or from the street?

And if you stand on the balcony, do you consider yourself inside your house or on the street?

Have you ever stayed alone overnight at a foreign airport?

Or did you feel uncomfortable taking a long walk through a parking lot devoid of people and movement?

After breaking up with a loved one, changing careers, or moving from one city to another, have you ever felt unsettled or uncertain?

This physical and psychological experience is known as the in-between, the quality of becoming - the distance between what was and what is to come.

Becoming is often associated with rites of passage in our lives, personal transformations, social structure and behavior, and this is evident in our transition, for example, from childhood to adulthood and adolescence, from celibacy to marriage, from career to retirement.

And you pass through transitional spaces all the time every time you walk from your house to your neighbor's house, when you drive from city to city, take a ride, or simply move your groceries from the store to your car.

We as human beings tend to be goal-oriented in our movements and actions.

We leave one place to reach another;

These two points in time and space take precedence over the journey that lies between them.

Perhaps the journey is more important than the destination we choose to travel to.

In one of my visits from the Emirates to Egypt, I returned to my village and visited “El Madawy School”, my primary school, during a school vacation, I was not comfortable, the frightening absence of students and teachers created for me a surreal feeling, and reminded me of similar feelings of discomfort and strangeness when I was found during my travels In Canada and the United States I get off at late-night bus stops or deserted train stations in towns of several hundred people, or empty art galleries or unused halls of private universities.

We may feel uncomfortable or awkward when transitioning from a career to retirement, as many people associate their place in the world and their stability with their work.

If you lose your job, or if you decide to make a career transition to something new, it can destabilize a key pillar of confidence and certainty in life.

The period of time during which the couple is engaged is a transitional period that may be worrisome.

In it, we see that romance has passed the stage of dates and acquaintance, but marriage is still far away, often months or years before the wedding.

In this case, you are on the threshold of transition, as if you are in the waiting room to enter from the world of rosy encounters to the world of engagement and marriage.

This period can be psychologically stressful.

My friend told me that he had written to a woman he loved and wanted to marry that he was looking for certainty and could not stand waiting and vagueness, so I sent him this advice: “Trust the worth of waiting, embrace uncertainty, enjoy the beauty of seeing things transform and shape before your eyes, then you will realize, smiling When nothing is certain in this life, everything becomes possible, if not possible.

Visiting scholar at Harvard University 

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