ON THE THRESHOLD

As my summer break draws to a close, I’m returning to work ready for the term ahead, but with one significant change: I’m moving to a three-day working week, with the occasional exception.
This is me formally entering my peri-retirement phase. Forbes describes peri-retirement as the period five to ten years before retirement, a crucial stage in preparing for a life without full-time pay, colleagues, and the institutional rhythms that have shaped our working lives.
My work is all about liminal spaces: helping individuals, groups, and organisations navigate thresholds in pursuit of development and transformation. It’s why my business is called Limen Associates. If limen is the space between what was and what’s next, then this is me stepping onto a threshold in my own working life.



One thing I noticed while drafting this post was how carefully I was choosing my words. I avoided saying that I was reducing my working week from five days to three.
That’s factually accurate, but it doesn’t capture how it feels.
I don’t feel as though I’m reducing anything. I feel as focused and committed as ever. What I’m doing is creating space - for other interests, other rhythms, and other possibilities.
Rather than feeling diminished, I feel energised.
This shift feels less like a door closing than a threshold being crossed: one I’ve chosen to step onto, despite not being able to see exactly what lies on the other side.

​Over the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time creating spaces for people to talk about what retirement means to them. Through the Retirement Café, which I co-hosted with my colleague Liz Glencorse, and through a series of conversations with people thinking about the later chapters of their working lives, I’ve noticed people are generally reluctant to talk openly about retirement.

Even when they are thinking about it seriously, they often hesitate to say so publicly.

This is understandable. People worry that once retirement enters the conversation, they’ll be overlooked for interesting opportunities, passed over for promotion, or re-positioned as someone whose future no longer warrants investment.

The threshold goes unacknowledged. However, sooner or later, you’re standing on one whether you’ve named it or not.A transition that cannot be discussed cannot be planned for either; not by the individual, and not by the organisation around them.

Succession becomes something that happens to people rather than something they help to shape. Knowledge transfer becomes reactive rather than thoughtful. Important conversations are delayed until they become urgent or missed out altogether. Everyone loses the opportunity to engage with the transition while there is still time to do so well.

Retirement remains something of a taboo in many workplaces: almost a dirty word in cultures that prize perpetual growth, productivity, and forward motion.  So we keep our thoughts to ourselves for as long as possible.
In doing so, we miss the opportunity to learn from endings; that they can - and should be - approached with the same energy, care, and commitment as a beginning. They are not opposites at all. They are simply the same threshold viewed from different sides.

I don’t have a neat conclusion to offer. In many ways, that’s what my life’s work is about: exploring what happens when we speak more openly about the transitions that shape our lives and work.
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I suspect, however, that when retirement goes unspoken, we lose access to the wisdom of people who are already mid-crossing, those who often have the clearest perspective on what matters on either side of the threshold.
We also lose the relief that comes from being able to say, plainly and without apology:
This is where I am. I am on the threshold.

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