There are moments that, looking back, can hardly be described by what actually happened. Outwardly, perhaps nothing remarkable took place. No great farewell, no visible decision, no event that could clearly be divided into a before and an after. And yet I remember moments when something within me changed, even though I did not yet know where that change would lead. It was as though life had stopped pushing me forwards for a moment. The old no longer carried me properly, the new had not yet arrived, and in between there appeared a strange space in which I could neither go back nor really see ahead. I used to find these in-between spaces very difficult to bear. Today, I recognise something in them that I could not see then.
For a long time, I was used to associating movement with life. As long as something was happening, I could orientate myself. There were tasks, decisions, plans, expectations and some kind of next step. Even difficulties had something familiar about them because at least they told me what I had to deal with. Much harder were those phases in which nothing clearly moved forwards. When something was over but what came next had not yet taken shape, I quickly began to feel stuck. I wanted to know what would happen next, wanted to recognise some meaning, find a direction or at least have the feeling that this state served a purpose. Yet that was often where my greatest resistance lay. I wanted to understand a transition while I was still right in the middle of it.
Over time, I have learnt that such quiet phases are not always true stagnation. From the outside, they can look exactly like it. A project does not move forwards. A relationship changes without it being clear what will become of it. An old idea of one’s life no longer holds, but a new one has not yet emerged. During such times, little may happen that can be shown or measured. Inwardly, however, a great deal may be in motion. Familiar certainties lose their strength. Desires change. Something that once seemed important begins to grow quieter. At the same time, there are still no words for what might take its place. Today, I experience these phases more like an inner twilight. It is no longer quite night, but it is still a long way from bright morning.
It was precisely this not knowing that I once found so difficult. I wanted to fill the gaps. If a direction was missing, I looked for a new one. If something ended, I wanted to understand as quickly as possible what it had been for. There is probably a deep human need for coherence in this. We want to experience our lives as a story in which one chapter leads understandably into the next. But real life does not always write itself so neatly. There are pages on which hardly anything happens, and passages whose importance we understand only years later. Some transitions cannot be rushed without taking away precisely what they might have shown us.
During such times, I have also noticed how strongly we define ourselves by what we are doing or striving towards. When a goal disappears, more can begin to wobble than just a plan. Who am I if I am no longer working towards what occupied me for so long? What remains when a role no longer fits or a desire loses its meaning? Such questions can feel uncomfortably empty. At the same time, there is something honest in that emptiness. For a moment, it takes away the answers I have given myself about who I am. Not so that I lose myself, but so that it can become visible whether those answers still belong to me at all.
Through my exploration of inner perception, I have learnt not to judge such spaces so quickly. I no longer automatically see them as a sign that something is going wrong. Sometimes it feels more as though something within me is rearranging itself before a clear movement can emerge again. I would not make a universal spiritual law out of this. Every person experiences transitions differently, and not every difficult phase secretly carries some great message. But I have found that there are things I could only perceive after the familiar noise had become quieter. As long as I knew where I wanted to go, I mostly heard that wanting. Only when it weakened could something else rise to the surface at all.
For me, this thought also connects with Become Magical Again. Not because such in-between periods are especially mystical, but because while writing the book I kept thinking about those moments when life, for a while, does not ask about function, achievement or direction. When we do not immediately name, explain or use everything, another kind of perception can emerge. What is unfinished is allowed to remain unfinished. A path does not have to be visible yet for something to be moving. I have the impression that we lose much of this quiet magic when we treat every pause as a problem that must be solved immediately.
The strange thing is that a new beginning often does not look like one when it first begins. In hindsight, it is easy to say that something changed there. In the moment itself, it may feel completely unspectacular. A different response than before. A thought that suddenly no longer has power. A decision that no longer has to be forced. An old longing that has quietly taken its leave. The new does not always enter our lives with a great sense of departure. It can appear so quietly that at first we mistake it for nothing. Only later do we realise that we have already begun to see differently, decide differently or feel differently.
Today, these in-between spaces have taken on a quality of their own for me. I do not have to love them, and I still do not experience them as comfortable. But I have stopped confusing them immediately with emptiness. When familiar movement pauses and nothing new has yet taken its place, I sometimes think of the brief moment in a breath just before exhaling. For a tiny instant, it seems as though nothing is happening. And yet that moment belongs to the same movement. Perhaps some periods in our lives are like that too. Not the end, and not yet the beginning, but that barely visible moment in between, when time holds its breath and something new is still quiet enough that we cannot yet recognise it.