Thanks to Mary Potter for putting us on to this quotation from Tom Lutz:
“Crisis suggests an emergency that needs to be responded to, needs to be snuffed out like a fire, and now that I return to this stuff, I don’t think the language of crises makes sense for most people. Turner’s liminal state is much more useful. To be liminal is to be on a threshold … we no longer believe that there is a standard set of changes (as we march from stage to stage to stage) or that there is an ideal outcome that can be managed by a standardized ritual or psychotherapeutic intervention—these ideas are simply out of date.
But we do transition, we do change, with any luck—no sense sucking our thumbs all our lives—and each change can happen smoothly and happily or roughly and unhappily. The threshold separates two states: a state of being that exists and that we know, and one that doesn’t yet exist that we need to create. This means that the threshold is a moment of open opportunity, one in which a little aimlessness might be helpful….We have…on the personal level, rejected the mid-twentieth century view of inexorable progress and allowed for a great deal more aimlessness. We can, now, stand on the threshold and see not right and wrong paths but an array, a set of (not necessarily mutually exclusive) possibilities. Or we can stand and see the abyss.”
Tom Lutz, Aimlessness, pp.108-09
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