You’ve been there before, watching the blazing sun slip beneath the horizon, everything shifting hue as the light changes. The day recedes, but the night has not yet appeared. Twilight. Anthropologists call this liminality, the threshold between what has ended and what is coming into existence. It is one of the most profound ideas in anthropology, first described by Arnold van Gennep and later expanded by Victor Turner. They recognized this middle stage of every rite of passage as the moment when social roles dissolve and something new begins to take form.
Travel makes this easy to feel. You pass through security, wait at the gate, lift into the air, and land somewhere else. Between departure and arrival, you are not where you were, and not yet where you’re going. You’ve left one world behind, but the next has not fully opened to you.
Our teammate Lada carried that same in-between energy when she visited us earlier this year in Oregon. In this photo you see her gazing at the Pacific sunset, still jet-lagged. The sky itself seemed to mirror her passage, neither day nor night, holding both endings and beginnings in one luminous breath.
In finance as well as all other workplace arenas, liminality unfolds daily. A client retires and must reconstruct identity beyond a title. A widow learns to navigate wealth once shared. A young family takes on new responsibility. These are events and cultural crossings.
In traditional societies, such passages were supported by ritual and community witness. In modern life, that role often falls to advisors, therapists, coaches mentors... guides who are asked to offer support and stand steady while others cross invisible thresholds.
When an advisor stays grounded and attuned, their presence becomes a stabilizing ritual. The client’s nervous system senses safety and begins to settle. This is co-regulation, the biology of trust, and it echoes the old wisdom that transformation happens in connection.
Susan Bradley and the team at Sudden Money and Financial Transitionist Institute have skillfully brought this understanding of liminality into the language of finance, reminding us that every financial transition is also a human one.