Podcast Short: The In-Between - Waiting for What Will Be

Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

“Right now, it’s Saturday for me. I’m between what was and what is yet to be, living squarely between a death of sorts and the unknown of the ‘what next?’ It is my Saturday. If the ‘yet to be’ is nothing more than what is transpiring right now, my future will be shrouded in the thick cold of bitter hopelessness. A shift in a slightly different direction, and there may be jubilation. Either way, right now it’s Saturday for me.”

An Intimate Collision

Ever been in the “in-between?” You know, something’s gone (whatever that is), but whatever’s coming next hasn’t showed up yet. Or, life shut down in one place and it hasn’t opened up someplace else. Or, there’s this huge hole in our lives where some ‘thing’ or ‘someone’ used to be, and now that ‘it’ or ‘they’ are gone, we’re waiting for what’s going to show up and settle in that gaping hole within us. We lost a friend, or we lost a job, or we lost a home, or we lost a parent, or we lost our confidence, or we a lost a goal, or we lost a sense of self, or we lost a marriage…or whatever we lost. And whatever’s next after these losses is nowhere in sight, and because it’s not, we’re stuck in the “in-between.” And we hate being here.

But while we’re there (because sooner or later we will be there), we would wise to remember that the “in-between” is nothing more and nothing less than the step to our next step. It’s not a place where we’re stuck. It’s not a place where the “wheels came off” and we can’t get them back on. That’s our impatience talking. Rather, it’s a place within which we are being made ready for the next step. But because we’re so incredibly impatient, we don’t give this time of preparation the time it needs to prepare us.

And often our greatest mistake is to force ourselves forward by fabricating the ‘next thing’ so that something showed up and we can move forward because it did. Or by shoving something into the places where whatever we lost used to be, and then moving forward without being ready to move forward because none of that stuff we shoved in there fit…or maybe it did fit, but we put it in there prematurely. Or worse yet, we delude ourselves into believing that we really didn’t lose anything, or at least anything significant, and we just keep on forging forward to some destination that (in reality) no longer exists, or has shifted to a different place or moved to a different time. None of that works.

What we need to remember is that the “in-between” is not where our lives are stopped. It’s not some bottomless hole. It’s preparing you for your life. It’s a recalibration, not a reversal. It’s an end, but not a dead-end. So, if you’re in the “in-between,” learn from it, listen to it, be observant of it, tease out the lessons in it, and let it prepare you because the opportunities that it has for you aren’t going to be there forever because the “in-between” never lasts forever.