I’m preparing for an upcoming visit to Rancho La Puerta, a beautiful and magical health and wellness resort and spa. While there I will be co-leading guests through an experiential process we’ve titled Standing At The Threshold: An Invitation To Transformation. It’s a message in which we deeply believe, and as is almost always the case, we teach what we, too, need to hear.
We all encounter thresholds in our lives. Those spaces between here and there, between what has been and could be. Embedded in every threshold is an invitation to transformation, which is what happens when we choose to learn from and be changed by our experience. Stepping into that space is what might be known as a threshold moment. A time when we feel called to step over fear and uncertainty, across boundaries we’ve come to count on, and venture out into the unknown. Sometimes that threshold sits beneath a door that opens inward, summoning us deeper into self-inquiry and awareness. Moments like these call upon our courage to look into our shadows. You know, those parts of ourselves that we prefer to ignore or try to keep hidden. To look at those issues or relationships calling for our attention but are scary or painful to look at. Other times the door at the threshold beckons us out into the world. Taking risks, making necessary changes, embarking on new work, or practicing new ways of being in the world.
This past summer my husband had major open heart surgery. That, in and of itself, was a major threshold requiring more of us than we ever anticipated. It was the inward journey that proved the most daunting, the most instructive, and ultimately the most transformative. His recovery was anything but fast, and came with unexpected twists, turns, and backslides. We had to reckon, individually and together, with the realities of his experience. In many ways we were given the opportunity to go to the end. To say “Oh, this is what being old, incapacitated, weak, or infirm might look like. This is what the end might look like. This is what it might look like to have to go on alone, without the other.” Those reckonings were not fun, easy, or painless, but I’ll tell you what—they were so fruitful. We were given the gift of going there, right to the end, peeking over the edge, and then coming back again, all the time learning from and being changed by our experience.
That end will inevitably come. But not yet. And until it does, stepping over that threshold into the unknown future has further transformed our vision of what it means to be here now. To let go of any and all that doesn’t matter, and hold tight to who and what does. Threshold moments are game changers. And the choice is always ours to cross that threshold with awareness. Or not. Either way, the game changes. As our favorite NFL coach reminds us, games are won or lost in the fourth quarter, and we intend to live, love, work and play with abandon in this fourth quarter of our lives. As long as we both shall live.
May it be so.
For us, and for you, too.
