Navigating Nowhere Land: Pt. 1

Human Skills

🎵 He's a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody

The Beatles painted a bleak picture of a sad and solitary individual. He’s narrow-visioned and quite pathetic, existing aimlessly in ‘nowhere land’.

But the concept of ‘nowhere land’ doesn’t have to be negative or something to avoid.

Quite the reverse.

It’s a place that can show us paths to a new ‘somewhere’. It’s what we call a liminal zone.

The liminal zone

As the word implies, the liminal zone is on the threshold, or border, between two spaces. There are plenty of other names for it.

You could think of it as a gap or a marginal area. It’s a ‘nowhere land’, a ‘twilight zone’ or ‘no man’s land’ that exists between two identifiable places.

In literature, characters in the liminal zone often have a ‘wilderness experience’.

Heroic figures of myth and legend go into marginal areas to endure tests and trials, learn skills and face challenges, to prepare them for their missions.

Even in lighter fiction, characters might withdraw from their familiar environment, looking for ‘personal space’ before committing to a decision or course of action.

This happens in real life, too. At various points in our personal and professional lives, we enter the liminal zone.

In social and religious terms, it’s the transitional area people pass through (literally or metaphorically) as they move into a different stage of life.

It’s the place where rites of passage happen: birth rituals, initiation ceremonies, marriage celebrations and funeral rites.

It’s a place that feels unfamiliar, uncomfortable and even precarious.

It’s the place between two ‘worlds’ – the world of what we were and the world of what we hope to be or want to be.

Creative indecision

In the liminal zone we often experience what can be termed creative indecision.

Even though it sounds like a contradiction in terms, creative indecision can be positive and productive.

What is it?

Think of it as a temporary state of disquiet and anxiety – a type of disequilibrium – that can lead to re-evaluation, change and growth.

In a state of creative indecision:

• We might experience uncertainty, anxiety and fear but there’s the excitement of possibility and potential change

• There’s confusion but also an opportunity for introspection, re-assessment and clarity

• We feel ‘rudderless’ but there’s flexibility and a range of possible directions we might take.

It is important, though, to realise that possibility is not infinite, opportunities are not innumerable, and flexibility is not limitless.

More about that later....

Creative indecision is a gift of time

It allows us to pause. It gives us the opportunity to invigorate, refresh and reshape aspects of ourselves, our lives or our work.

Some people have described this ‘time out’ as an intensely spiritual or even religious experience. It certainly doesn’t have to be either.

But it can be an immensely powerful agent of change.

Nowhere man, the world is at your command 🎵

To be continued ….