Photo by David Pennington on Unsplash
Many years ago, The Different Drum, a book on building community by M. Scott Peck of The Road Less Traveled fame, made a huge impression on me. Peck described creating intentional community as a four-step process. In the first, “pseudo community,” people are polite and congenial and avoid saying anything controversial. In the second, “chaos,” conflict rips off the mask of camaraderie and leaves it in tatters. The third phase is “emptiness,” a troubling, uncomfortable state when participants are forced to let go of their expectations and preconceptions, prejudices, easy solutions, and desire for control. In the final phase, “community,” participants emerge from emptiness by reaching out to others with openness, honesty, and vulnerability, creating the basis for a peaceful community that can last.
This description, especially the part about emptiness, has remained with me through the years. Peck saw emptiness as a necessary pre-condition for reaching the desired outcome. Because it is so uncomfortable, it also happens to be the stage we stubbornly try to avoid.
I speak from personal experience. The emptiness is terrifying. Yet whenever I have made a major life change, the process of my own journey closely mirrors Peck’s process. The emptiness always comes before the resolution, much as “the darkest hour is just before the dawn.”
The emptiness stage also shows up, with different names, in other scholarly descriptions of how human beings change. In William Bridges’ seminal book Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (1980), the formula for transition is a three-step process: the ending (of one reality), a neutral zone, and a beginning (of the new reality). The neutral zone, the in-between stage comparable to emptiness, is the necessary bridge that makes the journey from ending to new beginning possible.
In less clinical language, the emptiness is often labeled “the messy middle.”
Whatever you call it, it is a state of mind that most of us avoid like the Plague. It’s painful. It’s that point when all our previous assumptions – about what’s happening, about our own abilities, about what we want – have been stripped away, leaving us on shaky ground.
Here’s how it often plays out in the transition I know best: the move from full-time work to no work at all, which once was called Retirement but I call The AfterWork. At work we know where we stand in the hierarchy. We have calendars and appointments to organize our days, assignments to undertake with deadlines to meet. We have clients, work associates, vendors, and others we see often enough to consider friends.
Then one day we leave the work world and find ourselves in a liminal state with no assignments, no deadlines, no appointments, no contact with people, no structure, and for many of us, no clue to what comes next. All assumptions about a typical day are off the table. Nothing is certain, least of all our future.
That’s the messy middle. And it is not a place most of us choose to be.
Perhaps it is most aptly described by Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa. “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute,” he observed. “The good news is, there’s no ground.”
A little Buddhist humor there.
Uncomfortable though it may be, psychologists say we need to spend time in the messy middle to find our way out of our stuck places and into somewhere new and better. Just as emptiness was a pre-condition for true community, the messy middle is a pre-condition for personal Growth.
Psychologist Cara Gardenswartz suggests a change of mindset would be valuable in navigating transitional states. “What if we viewed these transitions not as disruptions but as opportunities for significant personal growth?” she writes. “What if the very moments that challenged us most were the ones that helped us grow?” If we embrace the unknown and allow space to process our Emotions, she adds, we can develop resiliency and other personal skills that can move us to the next stage.
The author and popular podcaster Brené Brown puts it this way: “The middle is messy, but it’s also where all the magic happens.”
So when you find yourself facing the prospect of change, don’t try to sidestep that feeling of being unmoored, unsure, and unclear. Sit with it, accept that it’s an unavoidable part of the process, and rejoice! It means you have a chance of moving into something far, far better.
