Appreciating the Liminal Moments

I had the luxury of taking a two-week excursion to the beautiful country of Japan this past June, and I still find myself fondly reminiscing about the trip. You've heard this story many times of late. That one coworker who went to Japan and came back parading the culture and aesthetics, showing you too many photos on your lunch break. Or your snobby neighbor who came back and insists that he knows how to properly eat sushi after training with a sushi chef in the mountains for a week. 

But for me, what lingers isn't the main tourist attractions or the unique experiences. It's the liminal moments. The waiting. The listening. The watching. The little pockets of downtime while I go from destination to destination. Whether it was missing the train because I hesitated on the platform, or sitting at the counter, watching chefs prepare my food.

Mundane moments like this are what we live for. They're the majority of our lives, while the Instagrammable moments are one in a million. These pauses keep us grounded and remind us that there's beauty and significance in the ordinary.

That's why I love people watching. Liminal moments like these make it easy. You get to glimpse into a moment of someone's life, almost always a raw and unedited slice of their true self. You notice the small things: someone smiling as they scroll, the awkward shuffle and apology of a tourist getting in someone's way, that friendly disagreement between a couple on where to go for dinner next weekend.

I invite you all to try it one day. Put down your phone. Sit on that park bench on a Sunday morning. Take yourself out to a busy cafe. Hop on that crowded train with no end destination planned out. Go out and simply observe. That's it. Close, far, it doesn't matter. 

Let your eyes and ears wander. Maybe it's eavesdropping on a conversation at the table beside you: two friends whimsically sketch out a future that may never arrive. You don't know them, and yet for a moment you're caught up in their lives, as if you've been childhood friends sharing inside jokes you never actually earned the right to know.

Hopefully, the next time you find yourself on vacation, you'll leave space to notice the smaller things: the quiet wait at the station before your train arrives, or piecing together drifting fragments of passing conversations. None of them are headline moments, but they're all too familiar anchoring points. They're the ones that make you feel like a traveler, not a tourist.

Go outside. Listen. Watch. Observe.