The Threshold
Arrival rarely looks the way we imagine it will.
There is the physical act of stepping into a room, setting a bag down, and closing a door behind you. And then there is the quieter arrival that unfolds beneath the surface, the one that takes longer, the one the body negotiates in its own time. I landed in Loreto yesterday, somewhere between waking and dreaming, my sense of time dissolved by two flights and several hours of transit. The body arrives first. The breath follows. The mind lingers behind, still scanning, still carrying the vigilance of the life I have temporarily left.
Estoy cansada. I am tired. The phrase surfaced unbidden as the taxi wound through the quiet streets of this small town on the Sea of Cortez. I said it aloud, testing how Spanish felt in my mouth after so many years. The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror and nodded. Sí, se ve, he said gently. Yes, it shows.
Cruzando / Crossing
I came here alone. That sentence still feels radical, even as I write it. At 60, after twenty-five years navigating the relentless demands of academic life, I booked a solo retreat to a place where I know no one, where no one expects anything of me, where the only schedule is the one I choose to keep. The decision carried both relief and a strange tenderness, as if I were doing something slightly forbidden.
Arnold van Gennep (1909/1960), the anthropologist who coined the term liminality, described thresholds as spaces of transition, neither fully one thing nor another. The word itself comes from the Latin limen, meaning “boundary” or “doorstep”. To stand on a threshold is to occupy the space between what was and what might be, to hover in the doorway before stepping through. That is where I find myself tonight: on the threshold between the life I have been living and something I cannot yet name.
Victor Turner (1969), building on van Gennep’s work, described liminal spaces as places where ordinary structures dissolve, where the usual rules loosen their grip. He called this betwixt and between, a phrase that captures the particular disorientation of transition. I feel that disorientation now, sitting on a terrace overlooking water I have never seen before, in a country where I speak the language imperfectly, in a solitude I have chosen but am only beginning to inhabit.
El umbral es el lugar donde todo puede cambiar.
The threshold is the place where everything can change.
Después de Años de Disrupción / After Years of Disruption
This arrival carries history. After the pandemic, many people learned how to be alone in ways they never intended. Isolation arrived suddenly, unevenly, and without consent. Homes became offices. Screens replaced faces. Silence grew louder, then exhausting. Loneliness took many forms, some quiet, some crowded, some invisible even to those experiencing them.
Coming into solitude by choice feels different. And yet the body remembers. It holds traces of vigilance, of separation, of longing for connection that went unmet during those long months. Bessel van der Kolk (2014), in his landmark work on trauma, reminds us that the body keeps the score, storing experience in tissue and nervous system long after the mind has moved on. My body carried the pandemic here, tucked into my luggage alongside my journal and my watercolours. Arrival asks me to acknowledge that history rather than rush past it.
Tricia Hersey (2022), founder of The Nap Ministry, writes that rest is resistance, a refusal to participate in systems that reduce human worth to productivity. For those of us who survived the pandemic by working harder, by performing wellness while quietly falling apart, rest can feel transgressive. Choosing solitude after years of forced isolation requires a different kind of courage: the willingness to be alone on purpose, to trust that this time the aloneness will heal rather than harm.
La Primera Noche / The First Evening
At first, habit took over. I considered unpacking everything immediately. I thought about schedules, routes, and productivity. My mind offered a list of things I could accomplish before bed: organize the kitchen, plan tomorrow’s meals, and respond to the emails still waiting on my phone. This reflex runs deep, an inherited habit shaped by a world that rewards motion and punishes stillness.
So I sat.
I let the room remain unfinished. I left the bag zipped. I noticed how my shoulders softened when there was nowhere else to be. Outside, light shifted almost imperceptibly, the desert mountains turning pink and then purple as the sun dropped toward the sea. Inside, something settled.
The Kaplans (1989), environmental psychologists who developed attention restoration theory, describe specific environments as offering soft fascination, a gentle hold on attention that allows the mind to rest while remaining engaged. Natural settings, they argue, restore depleted cognitive resources by providing stimulation that requires effort to ignore but minimal effort to attend to. The sea outside my window offers exactly this: something to watch without watching, something to hear without listening, something to receive without reaching.
I opened the windows and let the evening in. Salt air. The distant sound of waves. A dog barking somewhere in town. These sounds asked nothing of me. They existed, and I lived alongside them, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, that felt like enough.
El Acto Radical / The Radical Act
Arriving alone carries a particular tenderness. There is no one to absorb the moment for you, no one to narrate the experience to, no one whose presence dilutes the intensity of meeting yourself in an unfamiliar place. You stand at the threshold, and you stand there alone, and whatever comes next is yours to receive without mediation.
For women, especially women at midlife, this can feel revolutionary. Carol Gilligan (1982), in her foundational work on women’s psychological development, described how women often define themselves through relationships, through care for others, through responsiveness to needs that are rarely their own. To step away from those relationships, even temporarily, can feel like abandonment, like selfishness, like a betrayal of everything we were taught to value.
I think about my mother in Lethbridge, 80 years old, navigating widowhood in the house that still holds her husband’s absence. I think about the colleagues covering my responsibilities while I am away. I think about all the ways I have been trained to feel guilty for taking space, for claiming time, for prioritizing my own restoration. And then I think about what Audre Lorde (1988) wrote, that caring for myself is an act of political warfare, a refusal to participate in my own depletion.
Tonight, I am practising that refusal. I am letting the bag stay zipped. I am letting the emails wait. I am allowing myself to be tired without apologizing for it, without performing recovery before recovery has had a chance to begin.
Descansar es un acto de valentía.
To rest is an act of courage.
Lo que enseña el agotamiento / What exhaustion teaches
Jet lag is a strange teacher. It strips away the usual defences, the ability to perform wellness even when wellness is absent. Christina Maslach (Maslach & Leiter, 2016), who pioneered research on burnout, defines the syndrome as a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment resulting from chronic workplace stress. I recognize myself in that definition more than I would like to admit. I have been running on empty for longer than I knew, and the running itself became invisible, just the way things were, just what the job required.
Tonight, stopped at last, I can feel how tired I actually am. It lives in my bones, in the heaviness of my limbs, in the way my eyes want to close even as my mind keeps scanning for the next thing to do. Stephen Porges (2011), the neuroscientist who developed polyvagal theory, explains that our autonomic nervous system evaluates safety and danger through a process he calls neuroception. This below-conscious assessment shapes our physiological state. My neuroception has been calibrated for threat for so long that even here, in this quiet room by the sea, my body remains on alert, still scanning for turbulence that is no longer present.
It will take more than one evening to convince my nervous system that it is safe. But this evening is where that convincing begins.
Antes de Dormir / Before Sleep
The night has deepened. The sea is audible but invisible now, just the rhythm of waves and the occasional cry of a night bird. In Kamloops, it is late. In Lethbridge, my mother is probably already asleep, her scriptures on the nightstand, her prayers said, the space beside her filled with faith and memory. I am connected to her across the distance, connected to everyone I love, even as I sit here alone.
This is what I am beginning to understand: solitude is a relational state, shaped by the connections we carry with us even when those we love are far away. Netta Weinstein and colleagues (2021), in their narrative study of solitude across the lifespan, found that our sense of connection to others profoundly shapes the experience of being alone. Solitude becomes restorative when it is chosen, when it is bounded, when it exists within a larger web of relationships rather than as exile from connection.
I chose this. I bound it with return tickets and phone calls home, and the knowledge that thirty days will end. I carry my people with me, held in my heart rather than in my hand. And from that holding, I can begin to rest.
Mañana será otro día. Tomorrow will be another day. For now, I am letting this one be enough. I am letting exhaustion teach me what it knows: that I have been carrying too much, that the carrying has cost me, that setting the weight down, even for a moment, is the first step toward remembering what it feels like to be whole.
He llegado.
I have arrived.
Por ahora, eso es todo lo que necesito hacer.
For now, that is all I need to do.
References
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909)
Weinstein, N., Nguyen, T.-V., & Hansen, H. (2021). What time alone offers: Narratives of solitude from adolescence to older adulthood. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 714518. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.714518
