Five years ago, as part of a deliberate exercise in working through a decades long writer’s block, I wrote a post titled Limnos, and reflections on a life lived “dancing in between” dated 21.3.2021. For reasons far too complex to unpack here, I need to reflect on a life lived “dancing in between” and I cannot help but see it as an omen that today is 21.3.2026. This is a good moment to look back and to reflect, enough time has passed yet not so much that one has forgotten oneself. Let me begin this journey by reproducing words from the post written 5 years ago, which in turn reproduces words first written on this blog 21 years ago.
From the Greek limnos, meaning “threshold,” liminality describes an in-between time when what was, is no longer, and what will be, is not yet. It is a time rich with ambiguity, uncertainty, and the possibility of creative fomentation. And what particular advantages does living in liminality offer? ~ Barbara Schaetti, as quoted in my blog Perspective, May 2005
As I reread the words I wrote 5 years ago, including the snippets written 21 years ago, the word which fills me right now is the word ‘love’ – I respond those words written by younger mes with love. I am 60 now, another important life milestone, and to know that I was writing to myself and about myself when I was 55 and when I was almost 40 evokes in me the experience that can only be captured by the word ‘love’. Love has kept me here, rooted in one spot, for just over 12 years – the longest I have ever lived in one location on this planet in my entire life. The seeds are deeply embraced within me – I cannot describe this as a love for this city or this country or this landscape or that person or whatever. It is all that and more. It is a resonance of a tuning fork with the chi of the geography, as a holistic and whole entity. Place is a concept that centers entire knowledge systems in many parts of the world. Ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, and cosmologies – entire knowledge systems – are rooted in their Place. And, for the first time in living memory, I have these roots too. From this Place, I know look outward. Place is within me and sweeps itself like a wind blowing through and in between all of those atoms and particles and molecules which make up this version of the me of me.
Five years ago, I was dismantling my long ago embrace of a ‘life lived in liminality‘ because I had interpreted it geographically, as a constant move from place to place – the only way I understood it from my own highly mobile childhood. Embracing liminal space more than 20 years ago as the operating conditions for perspectives on emerging futures and innovation and design had begun to chafe at me as I increasingly experienced the urge to settle down – wholly and completely – without the tugs of wanderlust and wonder that had long characterized my life journey. However, as I reread all the writings from March 2021, when I sat down to write again as a means to shift my own perspective and in particular, the focal length of my mind’s eye which was far too focused on distant far horizons rather than what was right here at home at my feet, I can see I might have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Qualities inherited from the life lived in limnos include:
1. Cross cultural skills such as flexibility, tolerance and strong observation skills
2. Comfortable with ambiguity.
3. Multi-dimensional world view.
4. Open to other value systems
(synthesized from Debra Carlson’s timeless essay)
Guided by Dr Schaetti on the telephone back in 1998, I learnt to convert these qualities into marketable skills and developed them over the years into a foundation for the work I do. Dr Schaetti told me that was the best that we could do, which is take these complicated griefs and losses, the strengths and the weaknesses, and convert them into our own crafted sense of identity. We had not cultural roots to draw on. We had to make our own. And, an anchoring guide was often through developing a professional or career identity. How could I use the skills and strengths of being a global nomad – a third culture kid – in developing for myself a professional identity? This is how I interpreted her words.
The work I do and the work I have done, ever since the turn of the century, have one way or another been resting on these 4 pillars. Towards the end of September in 2005, within months of my arrival in San Francisco to hang my shingle out as an independent practitioner in the wider design industry, I deliberately sat down to work out the linkages between the qualities of a lived in liminality (Carlson n.d.) and a design planner operating at the fuzziest of front-ends. The sad part is that what we used to describe as a design thinker in 2005-2006 – someone at the interface of business and design – is a definition that rapidly got subsumed a couple of years later as the entire concept of design thinking took off and both the professionals and the academics on both sides of the Atlantic picked it up and ran off with it in far too many conflicting and contradictory directions. With all due respect. So I lost the identity that I’d sat down and crafted for myself between 2005 and 2007 in San Francisco. When I crossed the pond in 2009 to come to Finland, I rapidly realized that design thinking as it was understood in Otaniemi was an entirely different animal and either I’d have to change myself and my identity or simply drop my association with the label of design thinker.
Now, I realize that what I need is a label. One that will work for academia and can be tightly constructed with citations and supported with the literature. Without a label, the merits of my contributions are made harder to judge from within an institution (“the academy”) defined by its need to define, describe, categorize, boundify, and silo every breath before it can be recognized.
