Personal reflection on finding clarity through stillness

A day without a concrete plan can feel like a thick slice of sourdough without butter, or a long hike without a drop of water – dry, relentless, slightly uncomfortable.

That was me for much of 2025. At 44, between jobs, between identities, and uncertain as to what came next, I kept trying to wrestle the future into existence. Should I move? Should I get divorced? Maybe I should get a new tattoo. That’s when I discovered that the hardest place to be is in the not-knowing, the in-between.

In the West, we often call it “the void”, which immediately conjures up images of a dark hole ready to swallow us whole. Anthropologists have a name for it too: liminality, the period after one identity has dissolved but before another has fully formed. We all pass through these thresholds, often more than once.

I’d been searching for a more hopeful way to think about that liminal space. Then, while rewatching Wim Wenders’ 2023 film Perfect Days, I realised I’d encountered one years ago, in Japan.

This movie follows Hirayama, a quiet man who cleans Tokyo’s public toilets and leads an almost ritualistic life. He eats simple lunches from the local konbini, tends to his plants and often pauses to tilt his head towards sunlight shimmering through the leaves – komorebi, as the Japanese call it. Very little happens in the movie. Yet those pauses, silences and uneventful moments are what give the film its emotional weight.

This is the essence of a Japanese philosophy called ma. It’s often translated as “the space in between”, but that’s almost too simple. Ma isn’t just empty space – it’s meaningful space. It’s the pause between two notes, the silence between two people who know each other well or the emptiness of a cup waiting to be filled with tea. The Japanese garden scholar Teiji Itoh describes ma as “imaginary space”.

Yet in our modern, productivity-obsessed world, we’ve become convinced that every gap needs filling. If there’s an empty afternoon, we should book something. If work dries up, we should hustle harder. If a relationship ends, it’s a sign to download the apps. And when life stops making sense for five minutes, we think we’ve taken a wrong turn – or failed.

From the inside, the in-between can feel incredibly unproductive and lonely. You can’t point to achievements. There are no milestones or before-and-after photos. It’s frustrating because our brains crave movement, progress, certainty. We want proof that we’re going somewhere.

During my year in the waiting room, as I came to call it, I started talking to other women. Most were in their 40s, with children who no longer needed them every minute of the day. Some were burned out from high-intensity careers. For others, the life they had built, which looked perfectly sensible on paper, started to feel like a phantom limb.

So they made a move. They left the marriage, or the corporate job, or the profession they’d studied years for, mostly because staying had become more unbearable than not knowing what came next.

One newly separated woman told me she felt as though she’d disappeared.

“I couldn’t even make small talk,” she said. “People ask what you’ve been up to, and you have nothing to say except... thinking.”

Another had quit a toxic veterinary job in a regional town. Everyone thought she’d lost the plot. “People called me lazy. Or they’d hint that I’d wasted an expensive degree just to stay home and ‘figure things out’.”

It took her a year to come up with an idea to open a mobile veterinary business that gave her the freedom and joy she’d craved. Looking back, that empty year was probably the most important work she did. But nobody applauded it because, from the outside, it looked like nothing.

Growth has terrible PR because most of it happens underground. Seeds don’t look impressive before they break through the soil. Forests don’t grow overnight.

This is where ma offers something our culture has forgotten. We have little language for these transformative stages of life – puberty, menopause, creative rut or career pivot. We glorify beginnings and endings. We celebrate productivity, whether it’s having a child, getting a new job or buying a house. But the bit in the middle: the waiting, wandering, dissolving, becoming? It is treated like a nuisance or a delay. Yet the reality is that these phases are exactly when something essential, though invisible, is taking place.

A Japanese friend told me a story about a squirrel and a forest. Driven by instinct, squirrels bury nuts and seeds to prepare for winter. But many forget where they hid them, or die before returning to their caches, leaving the seeds to sprout into brand-new forests. Maybe it’s okay to not always know what comes next.

I still don’t enjoy the in-between. My instinct is to reach for another plan, another pitch, whenever life falls silent. But then I think of ma. Yesterday morning, before an important call, I spent 20 minutes sitting on a bench, looking up at the trees like Hirayama in Perfect Days. I wasn’t waiting for inspiration or trying to be mindful. I was simply making space.

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