The Space Between

Today is the autumn equinox.

Day and night are equal. Summer hasn't entirely disappeared, but autumn is unmistakably arriving. The light has changed. The mornings feel different. We're no longer quite in one season, but we're not completely in the next either.

It feels rather appropriate this year.

There are quite a few things in my life that seem to be sitting somewhere between before and after.

My youngest has finished school. He has a university place, although he isn't heading there just yet. After twenty years of having a child at school, that particular part of family life is over.

My husband, Donald, is now working three days a week. By November, he will have finished work altogether.

We've also started talking about selling our house and downsizing. Nothing has been decided. We're not poring over estate-agent listings or packing boxes. But the conversation has begun. We've even painted a few door frames and made a couple of trips to the dump. Evidence!

And there is something rather sobering about discussing what might be the last house you ever buy.

None of these things has quite happened yet. And yet the old version of life has already begun to shift.

We're not quite there anymore.

But we're not there yet either.

We're in the space between.

The temptation to hurry

I am quite good at beginnings.

Give me a new project and I can happily buy a notebook, devise a plan, make a list and decide how everything is going to work from now on.

But this particular transition doesn't seem to want a plan yet.

I don't know what it will be like when Donald retires. I don't know how it will affect him, or me, or us.

I don't know whether we will actually move house, where we might go, or what it will feel like to leave the house that has held so much of our family life.

And I don't yet know what this next stage of family life looks like.

There are an awful lot of things I don't know.

My instinct is to try to turn those unknowns into decisions. To get on with it. Work out what comes next.

But I think there is something to be said for not doing that.

The equinox

I keep coming back to the equinox.

We tend to think of it as the beginning of autumn, another marker in the year, but I like the idea of it as a threshold.

Summer hasn't entirely disappeared. Winter is still some distance away. Things are simply beginning to turn.

Nature seems much more comfortable with transition than we are.

It doesn't demand that summer finishes neatly on Friday so autumn can begin on Monday.

For a while, both seem to exist at once.

Perhaps our lives are like that too.

Yoga is full of transitions

We spend a lot of time in yoga thinking about poses.

Downward Dog. Warrior II. Triangle. Tree.

They are the things with names. The shapes we recognise. The places where we think we are supposed to arrive.

But a yoga practice is also made up of all the movements between them.

How do you leave one thing?

How do you approach the next?

Can you pay attention while you're on your way?

A transition isn't simply the bit we need to get through before the next proper thing begins. It is part of the practice.

I'm beginning to wonder whether the same is true away from the mat.

There will presumably come a point when Donald has retired and it no longer feels strange that he isn't going to work.

There will come a time when having no children at school is simply normal.

Perhaps we will move house and eventually the new house will become just home.

But we're not there yet.

And I'm not sure that I want to rush there.

There is something rather precious about standing on the threshold of a new part of your life while still having one foot in the old one.

I can miss the years of school runs, packed lunches, parents' evenings and new September shoes while also being excited about what comes next.

I can love the house we've raised our family in and wonder whether it is time to leave it.

I can look forward to having more time with my husband and also wonder what on earth we are going to do with each other when he stops going to work.

Both things can be true.

Perhaps that's what this particular moment has to teach me.

Not how to move on.

Just how to be here, for a little while, in the space between.