The pain and the paradox
You know that feeling – the one that tightens in your gut when the old map of your life no longer fits.
One foot is planted in the life you’ve known, while the other hovers over an unfamiliar threshold. It’s not quite grief and not quite excitement; it’s something wilder and more alive.
(Except it doesn’t feel wild or alive at first. Not even close.)
It feels like static in your brain. Like you’ve lost the plot and no one told you there’s a new one. So alone. You can’t speak it out loud because the words won’t come.
You become a non-person. Disappeared in your own story.
We’re taught to fear these spaces, these gaps between what was and what’s next. Our culture loves a clear linear narrative arc: progress, purpose, success.
Yet, the real story of being human rarely follows a straight line. It folds in on itself. It pauses. It cracks open and invites us to start again.
I’ve experienced these cracks over and over: the abrupt endings, the slow dissolutions, and the disorienting silence that follows when an identity you’ve worn for years no longer fits. I’ve seen how easy it is to mistake that silence for failure. In the dissolution, there is always a viscerally painful moment of feeling untethered and disconnected from the whole.
But here’s the thing. In the freefall, the pain and the disorientation, you can reach out for the paradox. And that paradox might just be your salvation.
I’ve learned that the collapse is not always the problem. It’s often the chisel.
Michelangelo said that David was already in the block of marble—he simply had to remove everything that wasn’t him.
And this is what threshold moments do. They remove what no longer belongs. They carve. They reveal.
“We think we’re being erased. But sometimes, we’re being uncovered.
We’re taught to fear these spaces, these gaps between what was and what’s next. Our culture loves a clear linear narrative arc: progress, purpose, success. Yet, the real story of being human rarely follows a straight line. It folds in on itself. It pauses. It cracks open and invites us to start again.
Then through the cracks there is light so bright in it’s simplicity and clarity and it’s the beginning of something more beautiful. A kind of becoming that you really didn’t have on your dance card.
Here’s the thing: the in-between is not an absence, lack or failure.
It’s a space rich with potential.
In art, we call this negative space—the emptiness that gives the image its shape.
Without it, nothing stands out. Without contrast, nothing is seen.
Without silence, there is no music.
Without the dark, there is no light.
Without the death of what no longer serves, there is no birth of what’s next.
Negative space is not empty.
It’s alive. It holds everything the next story will be shaped around.
It is really the creation of space for a wilder idea: an invitation to becoming more truthfully you.
It’s a time when the noise of the world recedes just enough for you to hear what’s been whispering underneath all along.
Your song. Your story. Your forest breathing, your fields full of wildflowers. Sun on your shoulder. Salty water beckoning you to let go with a warm promise to hold your body in perfection, letting you bob and slip-slip towards an ocean of blue horizon possibilities just beyond your view.
I’m not suggesting that every time I have been in the heartbreak of a ‘between moment’, it was lit by sublime visions of grace and fairy dust.
Far from it.
In my experience, there is no shortcut in the pain stakes.
The end of a relationship, the end of a career, a business bust-up, the serious health diagnosis or an unexpected life fuck-up.
Splat.
Squashed dreams. Winded shame and the inability to imagine anything worse. Ever.
In all of my past moments of oom and doom I could share with you right now there is not one that yearns to be relived on this page for you. There are stories I still can’t tell without flinching.
And yet…
For every fall, every rupture—somehow, impossibly—something opened.
A doorway appeared where I thought the world had ended.
The threshold isn’t a void. It’s a womb
This threshold that I speak of is a living space. It’s the compost heap where the old story breaks down, nurturing the roots of what’s next. It is the ocean of possibility that stretches out when the river of your life meets the sea.
And it’s not just about you personally. Look around: the world itself is standing on a threshold. Old systems are crumbling, while new ways of being shimmer at the edge of our collective imagination.
We’re all being asked (not gently) to build a new story, one that’s less about conquering and more about belonging; less about striving and more about becoming.
If you’re here and you are standing between chapters know this:
You are not alone.
You are not failing.
You are in the space where new things grow. You’re possibly part of a quiet revolution of souls choosing to begin again, choosing to create something beautiful from the ashes of what has been lost.
This is not the end. It’s the unwritten part.
Let’s begin again, together.
Best wishes
Kaama
