Arnold van Gennep published Les Rites de Passage in 1909. In it, he described a pattern he'd observed across cultures and centuries: major life transitions follow a three-part structure. First, separation — the individual is removed from their ordinary social position. Then a middle period he called the limen, the Latin word for threshold. And finally, incorporation — a return to society, but changed.
Victor Turner picked this up in the 1960s and ran with it. He called the middle period 'liminal' and described it as a zone of ambiguity — a neither-here-nor-there space where the rules of ordinary life are suspended. The person in it is, as he put it, neither the person they were nor the person they will become. They are between.
Most of us encounter this transition in fragments. A long flight. A sabbatical. A serious illness. A month alone after a relationship ends. In these moments — when the old structures have dissolved and the new ones haven't yet solidified — something unusual becomes possible. Things that wouldn't move when you pushed become suddenly, briefly available to change.
The problem is that modern professional life has almost no tolerance for this. We treat transition as downtime to be minimised. We push through grief. We rush decisions. We fill the in-between with productivity, with networking, with moving on before we've actually moved through.
Away is built on a simple premise: that the liminal is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited well. That the in-between — approached with the right structure, the right space, the right guidance — is not empty. It's generative.
Van Gennep got there first. We're just building the infrastructure.