The Middle & Its Magic
Something is being assembled here, quietly.
“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious…¹”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Summary
Something ended, or something is ending, and what comes next has not arrived. You are between two versions of a life. Communities have long held people through parts of that stretch. Most of ours no longer do, which is why it so often feels like a personal failure. It is not. The body registers the crossing before the mind has words for it, and the psyche does its reorganising there, in the middle, whether anyone is witnessing or not. What follows is where the holding went, what its absence costs, and what the middle is actually for.
For most of human history, this in-between was something a community held for you.
Some passages a life takes are obvious. Birth and death, often marriage. Others are marked but less attended: divorce, illness, retirement, relocation, the ending of a role that defined you. And then there are the silent ones. The recognition that a role no longer fits. The slow arrival of questions about meaning. The sense that the person you have been is not quite the person you are becoming, with nothing outward to point at and no date on the calendar. These are the crossings often no one witnesses.
But loud or silent, what follows is the in-between. You have left the old room. You have not entered the new one.
There is a name for the middle.
In 1909 the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep observed that rites of passage across very different cultures shared the same three-part shape: a separation from what you were, a middle period of being neither one thing nor the other, and a return in which you were received back as something new. He called that the liminal phase, from the Latin limen, threshold. Half a century later the anthropologist Victor Turner described people in that middle as betwixt and between. Tibetan Buddhism had a word for it centuries earlier. Bardo: bar, in between, do, suspended. Dudjom Rinpoche introduces the bardo as a state of mind between one life and the next.
Across different traditions, the middle was viewed as the intermediate phase not as an empty void, but as an active, potent space of change, being unanchored from fixed identity, and allowing for profound transformation. What matters more is that:
The middle was expected. Somebody stayed with you through it.
Nobody suggested you were failing at it. The rites had a duration, though what was bounded was the container, not the person's inner process. A month of ceremony did not mean a girl or boy had finished becoming. It meant they were held for a month and then recognised.
Van Gennep and Turner are the names usually cited, and both drew largely on men's rites, where the passage ends in a new and visible standing. Audrey Richards saw something else. Working among the Bemba in northern Zambia in the 1930s, at a time when the discipline was almost entirely male, she sat through an entire chisungu: a month of near-continuous ceremony marking a girl's passage into womanhood, led by senior women, carried in songs, mimes and pottery emblems rather than instruction. What she described did not fit the prevailing theory that such rites simply moved a person from one status to another. The ceremony was doing several things at once, and emotional conflict was central to it. It portrayed the conflicts involved rather than dissolving them. She published this in 1956, eight years before Turner made liminality famous. Her book is a classic. Her name is far less known than his. But what she saw is something worth holding onto: a passage can be complete and leave almost no visible mark. The person is not who they were.
Some cultures still hold these passages.
In much of the world the weeks after childbirth are treated as a rite with a defined shape: zuo yuezi in China, sitting the month, a traditional practice rooted in TCM, documented since the Han dynasty² and practised today in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and by immigrant families abroad; sanhujori in South Korea, la cuarentena in Latin America, omugwo in Nigeria; held practices among Southern African communities such as the Tsonga and Zulu;and versions across India and the Middle East. A review of fifty-one studies from more than twenty countries by Dennis and colleagues found they shared three features despite enormous cultural differences: a period of rest, food the tradition prescribes, and family support organised around her. The mother is not expected to manage. She is cared for while she becomes someone she has not been before.
Traditional Jewish mourning works the same way in the other direction. It begins before the seven days most people have heard of, with aninut, the period between death and burial, during which the mourner is released from obligations of daily observance. The tradition assumes they will not be capable of them, and does not ask. Then shiva, seven days at home, receiving whoever comes. Shiva sits inside shloshim, thirty days from the burial, when some work resumes but celebration does not. For a parent, twelve months. Nobody has to decide how long is appropriate, or wonder whether they are taking too long.
What these have in common is not the practice. It is time. Company. Permission not to be functional. And a return. The person is brought back in, rather than having to reappear on their own and hope someone notices. None of it removes the pain. It removes the isolation.
But no culture holds everything.
Each holds certain passages closely and leaves others largely unattended. And what gets withheld is rarely the hardest passage. It is the one that carries shame. Where there is a script, the community knows what to say and when to arrive. Where there is none, it goes quiet, and the person in the middle reads that silence as being about them. That is human rather than cruel. But it leaves the person in the middle alone, which is what makes the middle hard.
Van Gennep's four passages were birth, puberty, marriage, death. Marriage is in that list. The ending of one is not. Which is strange, given how many marriages end, and how much of a person can end with them. It is not that divorce goes unmarked. In most of the world’s patriarchal societies it is marked coldly: a legal transaction, a date, a filing. We hold the beginning of a marriage with vows, witnesses and a feast, and the ending we record, and then leave people to it.
Every beginning we mark began with an ending we did not.
Kenneth Doka named it disenfranchised grief: grief for a loss that is not openly acknowledged, socially recognised or publicly mourned, where a person feels the loss but has no recognised right or role in which to grieve it. The loss is real. The recognition is missing.
Most of these middles are held by nobody. A miscarriage, where a death occurred and no funeral follows. An estrangement, where the person is alive and the loss cannot be named without inviting a verdict on who was at fault. A parent with dementia, present in the room and already gone. An ex-partner's death, grieved by someone the tradition gives no role to. A career that ended, or a country left behind, where nobody reaches for grief vocabulary at all and the person is more often congratulated.
Not all of these middles follow a loss. The first year of a marriage, when two lives are dissolving into one and nobody asks how it is going, because you chose it. A promotion into a role where everything you were good at no longer applies. A move to the country you wanted. These are unheld too, and harder to say out loud, because saying it sounds like ingratitude.
And some are worse than unheld. For centuries a death by suicide could mean funeral rites refused and a family excluded. The rules have changed. The pattern has not. People bereaved by suicide still receive less support from those around them than people bereaved by a sudden natural death, and are more often met with awkwardness.³
We have kept the transitions and dropped the structures.
You leave a marriage and update your address. You lose your mother and take three days of compassionate leave. You become a parent, or stop being able to work, or realise the life you built no longer fits, and there is no interval, no witness, no one who says: this part takes time, and here is who will sit with you while it does.
Where anything is held at all, the holding has been reduced to leave. Few weeks after a birth, sometimes less.⁴ Three days after a death. Then a return to the same role at the same pace, as though nothing fundamental had occurred. Which raises the question worth sitting with: are we honouring the person and life behind these passages, or taking time off to manage them?
The middle still happens. It mostly happens privately now, without language and without witness, which is why it so often feels like something has gone wrong with you personally. Something has gone wrong. It is not you.
And here is where the real conflict sits.
The environment expects one thing. Bounce back. Finish grieving. Be recognisably yourself by Monday. The body wants something quite different and takes longer than the calendar allows. That is a genuine conflict of interest between a person and their surroundings, and it is precisely what the chisungu portrayed openly rather than smoothed away. Our arrangement does the opposite. It keeps the conflict out of sight and locates the difficulty in the person.
There is a layer beneath that, which varies by culture and family. In some places, asking for company through a passage is ordinary. In others it is read as evidence of not coping. That is not a difference in character. It is what people were taught, usually early, usually without anyone saying it aloud.
The cost of carrying it alone is not only felt. It is measurable.
The in-between is, among other things, a long stretch of not knowing. And uncertainty itself is not the problem. Life is uncertain, and much of what matters in it cannot be made predictable. What the research points to is narrower: uncertainty carried alone, without structure or recognition, becomes expensive over time.
Peters, McEwen and Friston argue that stress originates in uncertainty, and that when it cannot be resolved, the body carries what McEwen called allostatic load. Stress responses that stay switched on, with real consequences over months and years for health, mood and thinking. In one study, people facing a fifty percent chance of an electric shock showed higher stress than people who knew for certain one was coming. Not knowing was harder than knowing the worst.
This is what people in the middle keep finding about themselves.
Sometimes the outside has changed enormously. Sometimes almost nothing has. Either way, the tiredness tends to outlast what anyone would consider reasonable, including the person feeling it. You are exhausted in a way that rest does not touch. That is not an evidence of weakness. It is what the body does when it is being asked to function without knowing what it is functioning towards.
The body is not a bystander in this. It registered the crossing before you had words for it, and it holds the reorganisation while the mind is still arguing about whether anything has changed. The old orientation lives in posture, breath and habit, not only in what you believe about yourself. Which is why thinking your way through a middle so rarely works.
What changes it is not certainty. It is company.
Cohen and Wills set out the buffering hypothesis in 1985: supportive relationships reduce the effects of stress rather than merely making people feel better about it. Holt-Lunstad's meta-analysis of 148 studies found that social relationships influence mortality risk comparably to well-established factors such as smoking. And there is mechanism behind it. The presence of a trusted person inhibits fear learning itself. Supportive company is not only consolation. It shows up in our physiology.
Part of what company does is simpler than support. It witnesses. Something changes when an experience is seen by someone else, before anything about it is solved.
There is a shape to it.
William Bridges observed that transitions do not begin with the new thing. They begin with an ending, followed by a long middle he called the neutral zone, which people consistently try to skip, before anything genuinely new can start. The neutral zone is not empty time. It is where disorientation turns into reorientation, on its own timetable. It is where the old arrangement loosens enough for something else to become possible.
Robert Kegan described something similar in adult development: a way of making sense of yourself stops holding before the next way has formed, and there is a period of being between two ways of knowing. Disorienting by definition. That is not a sign of regression. It is what growth looks like from inside.
Which suggests something about the in-between that is easy to miss while you are in it. The discomfort and the possibility are not two separate things, one of which has to be got past to reach the other. They arrive together. The energy is in the tension.
Why does the middle feel so difficult?
Not merely because it is uncertain. The middle is a period in which the psyche loses its usual organising structures: identity, narrative, certainty, defences, familiar projections, roles, sources of meaning. The anxiety that follows is not necessarily evidence that something is wrong. Some of it is the experience of no longer being organised by the old structure before a new one has consolidated.
Which is where another person does something beyond comfort. While internal continuity is being reorganised, relationship can supply enough continuity to make the disorganisation bearable. Not to resolve it. To make it possible to stay in it unresolved.
Cultures recognised the threshold externally, through ritual. C.G. Jung was interested in what happens when the same threshold occurs internally, with nothing outward to mark it. He held that the dissolution of an old identity is a meaningful psychic process in its own right. Something old loosens, unconscious material becomes more available, and the psyche reorganises before a new orientation has formed.
The middle is not merely something to endure or get through. Something is happening there.
There is movement in it.
The middle does not necessarily require us to discover a new truth. It may require us to remember one that became obscured while we were living inside the old structure.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés gives the same process an image. In La Loba, from Women Who Run With The Wolves, an old woman gathers the bones of the wolf and sings it back to life. What she restores is not something new. It was already there, waiting to be gathered. Estés is explicit that this kind of recovery does not mean coming undone or losing one's socialisation. It means finding your own territory, being in your body with certainty, speaking on your own behalf, and retaining as much consciousness as possible.
Perhaps this is one of the deepest tasks of a threshold: not to invent a new self, but to remember what is true beneath the identity we inherited or performed. The middle can scatter what we thought we knew about ourselves. It can also make what is essential easier to hear. What returns may feel new only because we had forgotten it.
Which is the answer to what the middle is for. Not a new self. What was already yours, made conscious.
Being seen in it is not consolation. It is what makes what is loosened in the middle reachable at all.
None of this makes the middle comfortable. It does make it legible. And legibility changes something before the situation does: you are no longer failing at an unnamed thing.
You are somewhere, and it has a shape, and people have been here before and left descriptions.
And here is where our particular moment makes things harder than they need to be. These days we are unusually impatient with unresolved states. We have language for crisis and language for recovery, but very little for the long middle where nothing has resolved and nothing is obviously wrong. So we reach for the vocabulary we have, and it is mostly the vocabulary of malfunction. Burnout. Crisis. Failure. Something to be managed, fixed, or medicated back into productivity as quickly as possible.
Sometimes that vocabulary is right and points to exactly what is needed. But a great deal of what gets treated as breakdown is a threshold without a name, being carried alone, by someone who assumes their difficulty in crossing it is a personal failing rather than a predictable feature of crossing.
Which brings this closer to home.
You might recognise it as a soft ache. A restlessness with no obvious source. Sometimes it arrives with an ending you did not choose. Sometimes with a weariness in which very little feels alive. Sometimes as the strange, formless middle of reinventing something, where you have left one shore and cannot yet see the other.
Because the thing about thresholds is that they carry an unusual amount of opposite energy. The old structure has loosened, and things that were fixed are briefly movable. That is why it feels unstable. It is precisely why it matters. Very little of significance reorganises in a life while everything is holding firmly in place.
The possibilities in a threshold are real, but they are not automatically available.
What can be received depends on being able to move through consciously, with enough steadiness to stay present for what is there. That is possible alone. It is far more likely within company.
Where the magic lives.
The chisungu was not delivered as instruction. It was sung and enacted around the girl by the women, while she was in it. The knowledge arrived during the crossing, carried by someone else.
If you are somewhere in this, it is worth noticing what is actually stirring. What kind of space do you find yourself wanting? What happens in your body when you think about change: does something tighten, or go quiet, or lean forward? And underneath the noise, how clearly can you still sense your own direction, even faintly? Whatever surfaces, including resistance, is worth honouring rather than overriding.
The in-between is not the interruption before your life resumes. It is where the next version of it is, usually, quietly being assembled. It takes the time it takes. It is far more ordinary than it feels. And whichever threshold it is, it is not meant to be crossed entirely alone.
Life is not the two events at either end. It is the middle. And the middle only yields what it holds if someone can stay in it without pushing it away.
Notes
1. Quote:“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves.
2. Zuo yuezi practices were first recorded in medical texts of the Han dynasty, 206 BC to 220 AD. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/igh-blog/tag/zuo-yuezi/
3. The suicide bereavement finding. Pitman and colleagues found this in a study of more than three thousand bereaved adults in the UK.
4. Leave entitlements vary enormously. The ILO minimum standard is fourteen weeks at no less than two thirds of prior earnings. The WORLD Policy Analysis Center at UCLA, which tracks all 193 UN member states, finds that 96 per cent of countries guarantee paid leave to new mothers. Seven do not: five small island nations, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. In 2000 that number was eighteen. Across the OECD, paid leave earmarked for mothers averages 25.4 weeks against 12.7 weeks earmarked for fathers. South Africa provides four consecutive months under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, unpaid by default with UIF replacing 66 per cent of earnings, and three days of family responsibility leave a year, which also has to cover a sick child.
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