Living In The In-Between

On the feathered edges of life

Over the past few months I’ve had hundreds of conversations with people here on Substack.

On the surface, their stories sounded different…

One woman was learning to live after divorce. Another had just retired. Someone else had moved countries.

There were stories of grief, burnout, diagnosis, redundancy, empty nests, new businesses, unexpected freedom and the disorientation that sometimes arrives for no obvious reason at all.

What fascinated me wasn’t what had happened to them, it’s what happened afterwards.

Again and again I found myself reading about the long stretch that comes after the event itself.

The months where life no longer feels like it did, but hasn’t yet become whatever comes next.

The period where you’re functioning perfectly well on the outside while privately wondering why everything feels unfamiliar on the inside.

I’ve started to wonder if we give far too much attention to beginnings and endings, and nowhere near enough to the space in between.

It’s the bit in between that seems to ask the most of us.

When I look back over my own life, I realise the defining moments were never actually the day something changed. They were the months and years that followed.

Leaving South Africa. Losing my mum. Closing my business. Moving to Spain.

Even midlife itself hasn’t been one event; it’s been the longest and most complex transition I’ve ever had to navigate.

None of those experiences came with a clear dividing line between who I was and who I was becoming. They blurred into one another, slowly and almost imperceptibly, until one day I looked around and realised the landscape had changed.

I’ve found myself thinking of these gradual transition seasons as the feathered edges of life. A place where one thing gently gives way to another without a hard boundary between them.

It’s difficult to point to the exact place one watercolour becomes the next, or where land becomes sea through the reeds at the water’s edge.

Life seems to work in much the same way.

We imagine transformation arriving with dramatic certainty, but more often it happens quietly, while we’re busy getting on with ordinary Tuesdays.

Maybe that’s why these seasons can feel so unsettling.

We keep expecting solid ground while standing on shifting sand. We wonder why we can’t seem to make a decision, why our confidence has disappeared, why everything feels strangely out of focus.

We assume there’s something wrong with us, when maybe we’re just living through one of life’s feathered edges.

I’ve also begun to wonder whether this is why so much advice misses the mark.

Advice assumes we already know where we are. It starts by telling us what to do next. Build this habit. Change that mindset. Leave the job. Save the marriage. Start the business. Be braver. Worry less.

But how do you choose a direction when you can’t yet fully see the landscape you’re standing in?

It struck me recently that you don’t navigate by someone shouting directions from the shore while you sink beneath the waves.

You navigate by understanding the terrain. You look for the map. You notice where you are in relation to the dead-ends, detours and distractions.

You look at places others have travelled before you. That way, you begin to understand where you are before deciding where you want to go.

I wonder if that’s what so many of us are really searching for.

Not more answers – a clearer view.

Not someone to tell us which route to take – a better understanding of the landscape beneath our feet.

Because once you can see that landscape, something changes.

The questions themselves become gentler. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” you begin asking, “What kind of season am I in?” Instead of trying to force certainty, you become curious about where this particular path might lead.

The more I listen to other people’s stories, the more convinced I am that much of our lives are lived in these feathered edges. Not just in midlife, but whenever life asks us to loosen our grip on who we’ve been before we’re quite ready to become someone new.

Maybe that’s why these words appear so often beneath my writing…

“I thought it was just me.”

Because there’s enormous relief in discovering that the ground feels uncertain for other people too. That the confusion isn’t a personal failing. That maybe we’ve all been trying to navigate through unfamiliar territory with far less perspective than we realised.

I’m beginning to realise that the feathered edges aren’t the exception to life – they are where much of life is actually lived.