Crossing the liminal space

We’re not able to create everything we can imagine, at least not directly. If we could, we would have created Utopia a long time ago. We wouldn’t be dealing with climate change or injustice or any of the many problems we’re faced with today because we would have solved them.

We can imagine a living civilization, but we can’t go directly from that imaginal space to reality. Civilization has to emerge from the complex interactions and relationships of human beings. That is the nature of systemic change. We can’t, generally, redesign a complex system from the ground up. We have to make small changes that move it in the direction we want it to change. That might mean lots of small changes, all ideally moving the system in the direction we want. That might take a lot of different people working together (and not at odds with each other), and so it’s important that there be a common vision of where we’re headed.

The space between the imaginal and the “real” is what is called a liminal space. It’s the threshold between the two, and our task is to figure out how to move across that threshold.