These are the inbetween days. The days between the long, hot summer, the unnaturally long, hot summer we’ve sweated through this year, and the autumn that the poetic souls long to indulge and melancholise (yes, the coming days of mists and mellow fruitfulness). One is not quite gone; the other not yet here. These are the last days before the world leaves the holiday season behind and gets back to work.
These are “liminal” – boundary – times. When things are leaving one state and moving into another. Times of uncertainty, confusion and emergence. And times when we really need a ritual to navigate our way through. It’s onde of the things ritual does best.
The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep named this space more than a century ago in his observation of how humans find there way through change. Liminality for van Gennep is the middle stage of any rite of passage, sitting between the status quo and the (re)incorporation into a new way of being. Decades later, Victor Turner developed this thinking in what he observed of humans living actual lives: in liminal times and place, normal rules – the rules we have become accustomed to living by – loosen.
This makes the intermediate state – the inbetween days – an unstable place to be; things no longer seem as simple and as certain as your shorts and Birkenstocks have done all summer long. It feels uncomfortable and unclear (and not about when it becomes wrong to wear shorts). This is why so many cultures have created ways to mark the moment. And to help ease us all, safely together, into the new way of living.
In France, this liminal moment gets a name and a season all its own: la rentrée. Not just the return to school (la rentrée scolaire), but la rentrée politique as the government reconvenes, la rentrée littéraire as publishers release their big autumn titles all at once, la rentrée economique as business gets back to business. The whole country returns together, and everyone knows it, because everyone’s doing it in the same week. In Britain, we have no such shared marker — only the retail one. Back-to-school is the only rentrée we collectively bother with: new uniforms, new stationery, new me. It’s an entirely commercial – retail – phenomenon. With a sigh and a shake of the head, we just quietly go back to work, whenever the formal summer period happens to end.
That doesn’t mean we in Britain don’t feel the uncertainty and seek find ways to manage it. I have often found myself, on the beach in the last week of August, humming Christmas Carols, a familiar communal activity that I’ll be looking forward to doing yet again, later this year, with other people. Like everyone else, I’ll be buying new pens and notebooks. For the new term, some small schoolboy bit of me says. My way of getting me over the change to come, I guess. My little ritual practice. Odd, I know, but I spent a lot of my youth in and around churches (various). And in libraries and lecture theatres.
While the feelings this kind of liminality evokes and our very human ways of using culture to navigate it are both clear in this month’s everyday experience, I’m struck by how little attention we pay to the same things in other contexts – at the liminal moments in our organisations and communities. Or in the lives of our customers or patients. At the moments when we are encouraging them to change, too. To change their behaviour or their routine, their lifestyle or their diet.
The lovely Christian Ohm has been writing about this for a while in terms of organisational and personal change (see below), but as the seasons turn, and our lives with them, I’ve been pondering this: what’s the rentrée for other occasions? What’s the ritual we could give people — the shared moment, however small — to ease them from this into that? What are they already doing in the change programmes that could become a cultural practice or ritual, one worth naming? What could we steal from one group and offer to another as a cultural solution?
The inbetween days. I’m maybe humming carols on the beach, still. Shorts and Birkenstocks, not yet packed away for another year. How are you dealing with this time?
Watch: What other people do around this liminal time: are they determinedly holding on to the summer? Or are they already mentally tuned into what’s to come? How do they do after other dates in the calendar? Or after life changes, like divorce and bereavement? After graduation or promotion?
Reflect: How do people in your organisation or community manage the transition between now and then? Between the old way of doing things and the new?
References
Van Gennep, A. (1909). The Rites of Passage.
Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure.
Ohm, C. The Liminalist (Substack) — liminalista.substack.com
