In the Meantime
Four years ago, all the major pieces of my life shifted: marriage ended, nest emptied, house sold. It’s been Transition Central for a while now. A long while. I’ve used this time well, sorting head and heart and finding a lot of healing and growth. But now, four plus years later, I’m ready for something new. More than ready. I want my new beginning, and I am getting impatient.
Research says that transitions take, on average, five years. FIVE YEARS. At times I’ve felt like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, watching other people move on— finding new homes, new partners, new adventures—while I inhabit the same place and same routines.
No one likes being in the middle of a transition, that journey between what was and what-is-not-yet-in-form. We want to get there, wherever “there” is. I recently realized that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about “there.” Natural enough, perhaps, but not a great way to actually live, because life, as it turns out, is lived in the present moment. And as much as I’d like my vision board future to get here now, I also want to be present to my present. After all, new beginnings are created present tense, with all the small choices we make, all the work we do to prepare ourselves for our dream future.
Another word for this middle period, the time after one major thing ending and another new thing beginning, is the meantime, a phrase that just screams, “A place I do not want to be but must deal with.” A phrase that actually should be—as my friend Tina and I decided one night over a post-drinks drink at Boomtown Saloon (where all brilliant thoughts are born)— The MEAN Time.
While the meantime is a period of important reconfiguration, “The Mean Time” is challenging. It is in turns tiresome, worrisome, boring, irritating, and frustrating as we wait for the future to reveal itself, wait for the meeting, the flash of inspiration or revelation. It’s all too easy to become impatient with the unfolding, with Divine Timing, which, I will attest, is never OUR timing. And when you get impatient, there is a temptation to do one of two things: give up, or try to force a beginning.
If the meantime is a journey between two significant points, giving up is plopping down in the desert where the car breaks down and giving up on that dream of sitting by the sea. We compromise our soul’s desires, or worse, disappear into depression. Conversely, trying to get there faster, trying to force things out of their natural rhythm, is like taking an unmarked “shortcut,” getting lost, and having to painstakingly retrace your path back to where you turned off. You just wind up creating more meantime.
The truth is, the meantime is not an intermission between two chapters of your life: it IS your life. Yes, sometimes it is mean; life can be very mean. But it is also very wonderful, and amazing, and intelligent. Your soul knows what it’s doing. Let it show you. New life develops in it’s own sweet time; it always does. That timing is not ours to decide. Our only decision is how we choose to inhabit each mile of the journey.
