The space between stories
"Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow." — Celeste Ng
"For a seed to achieve its greatest expression," wrote Cynthia Occelli, "it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction."
Over the past few years, my life has come undone. And with it my whole identity; my sense of who I am.
It happened slowly, and in stages, this gradual unravelling.
Bit by bit, my old self, the person I had built a life around, started to come apart.
And so here I am, at age 52, my shell cracked wide open, and my insides coming out.
There was no lightning strike, no profound epiphany. Just a gradual accumulation of evidence that who I was trying to be wasn't working anymore; the disconnect between my constructed self and something more authentic beneath had finally created a breach too wide to ignore.
Some would call this a midlife crisis—that convenient narrative we've created to explain away the uncomfortable awakening that happens when we can no longer sustain the fiction of our carefully constructed lives.
I prefer to think of it as a midlife emergence.
The crisis wasn't the awakening; the crisis was the decades spent trying to be someone I was not.
It would be easy for me to wallow in the mistakes I’ve made, and the pain I’ve caused. But we either get bitter or we get better, so I’m choosing to say “Fuck Feeling Shit” about all of that and embrace this opportunity to start anew.
I’ve bought a van and I’ve taken a three months break from work.
Three months to be with myself. To be quiet. To listen.
Three months to choose being over doing.
My possessions have been reduced to what fits in my little camper van. My cocoon.
My calendar, once packed with meetings and obligations that validated my importance, now contains vast expanses of unscheduled time. I've traded certainty for possibility, achievement for experience.
As I sit here, parked up next to Loch Lomond on a beautiful, calm spring evening, I wonder about the parallels between my personal unravelling and the larger transitions we face as a society.
We too have built identities and systems that no longer serve us.
Our collective shell is cracking.
The philosopher Antonio Gramsci once observed that "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters."
We find ourselves in this interstitial space—between what was and what might be. The institutions and assumptions that shaped the last few centuries have proven themselves painfully ill-suited to the challenges we now face.
Our economic systems strain against ecological limits. Our social contracts fray under new pressures. Our technological capabilities outpace our wisdom to direct them.
Like me in my van, we are all living in a time of transition.
The problem with transitions, both personal and collective, is that they require us to exist in the uncomfortable space of not knowing.
We must release the security of the familiar before the shape of the new has fully formed. This is where I find myself now—my old life behind me, my new life not yet clear. All I know is that I needed to create space for listening, for becoming acquainted with the person I am becoming, rather than the person I thought I should be.
Perhaps this is what our society needs as well—a time of listening, of shedding what no longer serves us, of making space for new possibilities to emerge. The solutions to our collective challenges won't come from doubling down on old patterns but from the courage to imagine and embody something different.
All awakenings, individual or collective follow a similar, necessary and archetypal pattern. One way or another, life finds a way to show us that we are not who we thought we were.
Now I wake up to a different view nearly every day. Sometimes it's the ocean, sometimes a forest, sometimes just an ugly parking lot.
But each day brings the same essential questions:
Who am I when I'm not defined by my career, my possessions, my social status?
Who am I beneath the layers of expectation and adaptation that have accumulated over five decades?
Who am I when I stop trying to control the world I live in so that I can feel good, and surrender to the co-creation of being?
What do I actually want now?
We are facing similar questions collectively:
Who are we as a society when we move beyond defining success through endless economic growth?
What values emerge when we question the stories that have shaped our civilisation?
What might we become if we allow ourselves the vulnerability of transformation?
When we know that patriarchal capitalism is collapsing, how do we come together to create, in the words of Charles Eisenstein, the “more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”?
These are the questions that interest me now.
In the words of Paulo Coelho, "Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about un-becoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place."
I don't have answers. That's the nature of transitions—they begin with questions, with uncertainty, with the courage to admit that the old ways no longer work.
For now, I'm learning to embrace the discomfort of the in-between, this strange space where destruction and creation become indistinguishable from each other.
Like the seed cracking open, I trust that what appears to be falling apart is actually the necessary condition for something new to emerge. For me. For my family. For our society.
I am sure of one thing, though:
My internal journey has been one of moving from separation to wholeness; bringing together all the parts of me, with love and acceptance. Including, and especially, the parts of me I’d rather not face.
This is also the journey we are on collectively, with each other, and with the whole of humanity. And just as with our individual journeys, our collective journey towards wholeness will require us to face our collective shadows.
As the spiritual masters have said for millennia, what is in the one is in the whole.
I hope you’ll stay with me through this time of transition.
This time in between our story of seperatness, to our story of oneness.
I could use the company.
I’m 52 as well. Let me know if you need anything, something I could send