From Liminal to Immanent

No Longer Arriving. Just Becoming.

There’s a stillness found only in the in-between—when you’re no one, nowhere, caught between who you were and who you think you should become.

Transitions From Water to Sky

Somewhere over the Pacific, halfway between where I was and where I’m going, I feel paused. That strange emotional altitude when you’re not home, not arrived, just floating in the silence between two identities.

I scroll through in-flight movies I won’t finish. I eye the tray of food I won’t touch. I’m thousands of feet in the air, but I’m really somewhere deeper—drifting between old thoughts and the future self I haven’t met yet.

This is the liminal: the in-between moments—the mid-flight and the layovers. A waiting place so easy to dismiss, especially for goal-oriented people like me who chase clarity, labels, and conclusions. We’re taught that the real adventure begins after we land. We want arrival. We want the transformation to be complete.

But what if that’s not true?

What if all our “arrival points” are illusions—goalposts we move every time we think we’re close? We chase the next role, the next relationship, the next version of ourselves, like there’s a final Pokémon form we’ll one day become and finally stay. (I like #006 Charizard.) What happens to the infinite quasi-awkward snapshots of us we can’t quite accept?

We are always becoming. The person I am now won’t be the person I am tomorrow. The jokes I laugh at will change. My values will shift. Even the drinks I crave mid-flight will evolve—from orange juice without ice to a frozen Coke. So why do we try to package ourselves into neat suitcases? If we’re out in a river right now, I’ll say we’re not rocks. We’re the current.

To be immanent is to let go of arrival altogether. To realize there’s nowhere else to be. That presence isn’t a milestone—it’s a practice. A way of breathing into what is, instead of bracing for what’s next. It’s to stop running altogether.

Because if we never learn to be still in the sky, we’ll spend our lives trying to land somewhere that never exists.