Today I’m thinking about precipices and thresholds: those moments in life when we are poised on the brink of something new. You haven’t stepped into what’s next but you are teetering at the edge, toes hanging over the ledge and a breeze ruffling your hair as you stare into the spacious unknown.
Thresholds crop up more often than we think. We often pass through some portal without realizing it, shifting from one identity into another, or out of one season into the next. Thresholds can be obvious—the kind we arrive at before changing jobs or moving cities or any other major life transition—but I’m also thinking of the nearly imperceptible ones. The shift into psychological healing that feels so subtle we don’t even notice. Moving into a state of acceptance about something you’ve lost. Stepping into, or out of, a fog of depression.
I had the sense of arriving at a precipice in the final weeks of pregnancy. The whole experience had felt like a pilgrimage, and when I approached the end, I realized I was leaving one strange country only to enter a new one. With one month to go, the baby filled out what little space remained in me. Like bellows sighing in and out, my middle expanded and collapsed as she stretched. Even when sitting perfectly still I was full of movement, floating in the surreal sensation of occupying a body that is simultaneously at rest and in motion.
For years I assumed that becoming a parent would make my life smaller—that it would require a relinquishment of ambition and risk and engagement with the wider world. But as I inched down the road toward her arrival, I began questioning this assumption. What if motherhood didn’t require taking shelter from the world but rather opening myself to it? What if this pregnancy wasn’t leading me somewhere smaller, but into a strange and wild landscape of which I will never stop learning the contours? With my hands on my belly and my daughter rolling beneath them like swell, like storm, the more I believed this might be the case.
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