In between

Our kitten Tuli in between my words and the world outside

You’re neither here nor there, a temporary place you move through to get where you’re going.  You spend your teenage years in between being a child and an adult, unmoored from both, floating in a sea of hormones and unfinished growth.  It’s not a place.  It’s a passage.

We are in a passage now, between Christmas and New Years.  You might fill it with vacation time, travel, extra sleep, undone chores, or simply pausing before the next milestone arrives.  But being in between is nearly always unsettling.  You think you know what’s coming, I mean New Years is a date after all, and it will arrive, but you don’t know, really.  A storm may come, or a war, or a death, even a birth.  But in between is slippery, isn’t it?  It’s not home; it’s not a destination; it’s not a beginning or an end.  You’re waiting.

It can be a gap that when bridged is thrilling.  Remember bench front seats in cars?  In between the driver and the passenger when you had the car and were driving somewhere with a girl on whom you had a crush on a first date.  What did you do with that yawning upholstered gap in between you?  Did you wait for her to move across to sit beside you with your thighs touching, or did you reach across and offer your hand to pull her over next to you, like the kids who were going steady did, seemingly glued to the left side of the car in a unit that said in a language you still could not speak, out of two, one?

In between was an unexplored world that was thrilling.  You could imagine, and that was the fun of it, because not knowing what it would be like, it could be anything.  Closing the gap between here and there was discovery itself.  Can you imagine what an early explorer who set off from the continent of Europe felt when through a telescope he saw a tropical isle with white beaches and palm trees and an extinguished volcano looming above?  Someone came up with the word “eureka” to describe such a feeling.

One of the reasons we love our cats and dogs is that they are forever in between.  Even when they are sleeping, they have not arrived.  There are places to go, toys to play with, walks to be taken, cat towers to be climbed, furniture to scratch, humans to be nuzzled, views through windows to be pondered, whole worlds to be desired out there from in here.  Because everything for them is new, in between-ness has a beginning and a middle and an end that we can experience with them, again and again.  Our dog, Ruby, leaps into the air and runs around us in circles, her eyes flashing and her ears flopping each and every time we say, “Want to go outside?” and reach for the leash.  That it’s repetitive is what makes it magic.  The cats have their own habits, waiting for one of us to sit down and provide a lap upon which to luxuriate through a nap.  They live in the anticipation of being in between walks and naps and eating and waiting for what comes next, even if it’s all the same.

We live the same way, with our own walks and work and our naps and our meals and our TV shows and our bedtimes. It’s magical to have it happen over and over.  We live in between repetitions.  

To be in between is to anticipate.  We know what happened on the shores of experience, but what’s next across our personal oceans?  As sentient human beings, we need the unknowable-ness of existence.  We live in the space between life and death. We fill it with our breath, with our hands, with our imaginations, with our dreams, with our hopes, even with our fears. Discovering what is out there in between is to be alive.