So much of our lives are lived in-between. In the morning, before work. Waiting for a meeting, a coffee date with a friend. Before the holidays. Before a job interview. Before the paycheck clears.

In-between. Liminal – existing at a boundary, threshold, or transitional space between two different states, stages, or places.

Otherwise known as: The states that make up the majority of our life. The snippets of time focused on the upcoming appointment, obligation or task; the unmet goal. The dots on the line of our life.

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, tried to capture this in his seminal Time and Free Will. Pushing back against the click, click, click of our thinking, the obsessive measurement of our lives. The incessant focus on ‘activities’.

The illusion of discrete states.

When really our lives are what Bergson calls duration. The flow of time, the brushed line of paint across the canvas – not the pointillist drip, drip, drip.

I recently left a job that – in hindsight – commanded a massive amount of my thinking. Extreme focus on the dots: constant planning for an upcoming meeting, an important conversation, a presentation; anxiously awaiting customer feedback, a board decision.

Then all that went away, and I was suddenly – nakedly – aware of all the “betweenness” that I ignored, that I had unlived. The actual majority of my days and nights.

Do the math: probably 10% of a day is the actual activity you planned for. 90% is what you experienced while you focused on the 10%. In other words: your consciousness was directed at the small circle on the dart board.

Or better yet, don’t do the math. Don’t focus on what Bergson called ‘spatialized time’, quantitative living. Don’t focus on the dots. Learn to live on the line, the majority of your life.