"The Science Behind Why Creative Rituals Help Guide Us Through Liminal Spaces" explores how threshold moments—between jobs, relationships, or identities—activate our brain's stress response systems and create profound discomfort. However, there is another kind of liminal space many people are navigating—one that is harder to name and less often discussed: the cultural threshold between inherited frameworks for meaning and whatever comes next.

This isn't about any particular belief or its absence. This is about the erosion of shared language for macro-level questions. We are between paradigms where we are no longer held by old answers and not yet clear on new ones, and this particular liminal space has its own challenges and opportunities.

The Meaning Crisis: A Cultural Transition

There is a restlessness many people share that doesn't fit neatly into clinical categories. Not depression, though there's a flatness. Not anxiety, though there's unease. What many are experiencing is something deeper and more philosophical: a sense that life is happening very fast, but meaning very little.

Philosopher Charles Taylor calls this "the malaise of modernity."[1] Others call it the meaning crisis. The symptoms are familiar:

• Accomplishing tasks, but not building toward anything that feels important
• Maintaining function while feeling disconnected from purpose
• Having freedom, but lacking frameworks to make that freedom meaningful
• Sensing that something essential is missing without knowing what that something is

This is its own form of liminality. People find themselves between inherited structures—whether religious, cultural, or philosophical—that no longer fit, and new frameworks they haven't yet discovered. The challenge isn't just individual; it's collective. Our culture excels at productivity, consumption, and efficiency. It struggles with devotion, mystery, and transcendence.

Research on what psychologists call the "existential vacuum" shows that this lack of meaning framework correlates with increased anxiety, depression, and what Viktor Frankl called "Sunday neurosis"—the sense of emptiness that emerges when productivity stops and we're left with questions about what it's all for.[2]

What Changed: The Loss of Making

For most of human history, daily life involved making things. Bread, cloth, tools, shelter. This wasn't leisure—it was survival—but it was also more than utilitarian.

Making served multiple functions that we are now realizing were crucial for meaning-making:

Participation in Creation The act of transforming raw materials into useful or beautiful objects connected humans to larger creative processes. Whether framed theologically or philosophically, making was how people experienced agency in an ongoing creation-centered narrative.

Temporal Connection Craft techniques were passed through generations. The bowl you threw used methods refined by countless hands before yours. Making linked you backward to ancestors and forward to descendants who might use your objects or learn your techniques.

Embodied Contribution You could see the concrete results of your labor. The quilt you made was designed to warm someone on a cold night. The table you built would gather family and neighbors. Your work produced tangible evidence of care and capability.

Rhythm and Ritual Making marked time—seasonal projects, daily tasks, weekly rhythms. This structure created what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called "thick time"—time rich with meaning and connection, not just sequential moments.[3]

Industrialization and digital work have changed this fundamentally. Most of what we use was made by machines we'll never see. Our work increasingly produces nothing tangible—emails, data, meetings, information. We contribute to vast systems, but rarely see concrete results in our daily lives.

This shift has material benefits, but research suggests that we've lost something psychologically and philosophically significant: the felt experience of participating in creation, the process of transforming material through devoted attention.[4]

Creative Practice as Threshold Navigation

Here's where creative practice becomes relevant to navigating cultural liminal spaces: craft offers many of the same functions that traditional meaning-making frameworks provide, even when you are moving between shifting worldviews.

Consider what contemplative traditions—religious or philosophical—have always included:

• Practices requiring devoted attention
• Repetition and rhythm
• Space set apart from productivity
• Orientation toward questions of value and meaning
• Cultivation of presence, patience, and acceptance
• Experiences of transcendence or connection to something larger

Creative practice, engaged mindfully, shares these features.

The Neuroscience of Making

Research on flow states—the absorbed, timeless quality of deep creative engagement—shows neural patterns similar to meditative states.[5] Both:

• Quiet the default mode network (the brain's self-referential chatter)
• Increase present-moment awareness
• Reduce activity in brain regions associated with self-judgment
• Create experiences people describe using language typically reserved for spiritual or profound moments: connection, meaning, transcendence, timelessness

Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's decades of flow research found that people report some of their most meaningful life experiences during deep creative engagement—not necessarily because the activity itself is profound, but because the quality of attention required to create something generates conditions for meaning to surface.[5]

The key difference between traditional contemplative practice and creating something: the making produces objects. The bowl you threw, the sweater you knitted, the painting you made become artifacts of your devotional attention—evidence of where you directed care and time.

Focal Practices: An Alternative to Devices

Philosopher Albert Borgmann distinguishes between "devices" (things delivering commodities with minimal engagement) and "focal practices" (activities gathering meaning and connecting us to reality).[6]

Devices maximize convenience, but can minimize meaning. For example, you can now generate an image in seconds using a prompt or download a polished stock photo with a click. The desired commodity—a usable image—arrives instantly. However, there is no relationship to materials, no sustained looking, no embodied decision-making, no skill developed over time, and no shared process of making. The image appears, fully formed, without requiring attention or care. The commodity is delivered efficiently, but nothing else happens.

Focal practices, by contrast, demand time, attention, and skill—precisely what allows meaning to take root. Making images through sustained practice is slower and less efficient than instant generation, but it gathers the maker into relationship with materials, perception, and process. Over time, the practice cultivates discernment, develops embodied competence, and connects the maker to artistic lineages and ways of seeing that unfold over time.

Crafting sits clearly in focal practice territory. Learning to work with clay, fibers, paint, or wood requires:

Embodied Skill Development Your hands must learn through repetition and failure. This process of skill acquisition—frustrating and humbling and ultimately transformative—is itself meaningful. Through process of making, you are becoming capable, not just consuming expertise.

When you're in a cultural liminal space of not knowing what framework will hold you, the concrete development of skill offers something solid: I don't know what I believe about ultimate meaning, but I know I can learn to throw a bowl. The learning itself is meaningful.

Relationship with Materials Wood has grain. Clay has temper. Fabric has drape. Each material has its own nature you must learn to work with rather than against. This relationship cultivates humility and attentiveness.

Research on material engagement theory suggests that working with physical materials in skilled ways creates what archaeologist Lambros Malafouris calls "material anchoring"—the materials themselves become thinking partners, not passive objects we impose our will upon.[7]

Temporal Depth A sweater takes months. Pottery requires stages across weeks. Botanical printing depends on seasons. These practices root you in natural rhythms and require patience. This is both countercultural and psychologically significant.

Studies on delayed gratification and meaning show that activities requiring sustained attention over time create a stronger sense of purpose than instant-gratification activities, even when the delayed activity is objectively less pleasurable.[8]

Creation as Gift Much of what people make, they give away.  When the scarf for a friend, the bowl for a family member, or the painted card for someone grieving, making becomes an act of devotion.

This operates outside of market logic. You can't price the care knitted into a baby blanket. Research on gift economies shows that gifted creations produce stronger social bonds than market exchanges, because they embody relationship ties rather than merely reflect transactions.[9]

Ritual and the Reclaiming of Sacred Time

A key challenge in cultural liminal spaces is that time often feels flattened. Without shared frameworks, marking certain times as distinct—Sabbath, holy days, liturgical seasons—every moment becomes potentially productive, every day potentially monetizable.

Time becomes what sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls "permanently accelerating"—moving faster without going anywhere meaningful.[10]

Creative practice can restore differentiation. When you set aside Tuesday evenings for pottery or Sunday mornings for painting, you are creating rituals within what anthropologist Victor Turner calls "liminal time"—time set apart from normal productivity, governed by different rules, oriented toward different values.[11]

Research on ritual and time perception shows that regular ritual practices:

• Create a subjective sense of control over time
• Reduce anxiety about productivity and achievement
• Increase a sense of meaning and life satisfaction
• Mark transitions in ways that help process change[12]

In this sense, the studio becomes threshold space. What happens there doesn't follow productivity logic. It follows the logic of devotion, exploration, and meaning-making.

Community Without Creed

One of the challenges people face when leaving or questioning traditional frameworks is the loss of community oriented toward shared meaning-making. Research consistently shows that meaning is made in relationship, not isolation.[13] Still, how do you create community around meaning when people hold vastly diverse worldviews?

Creative communities offer a potential model:

Shared Practice Even Without Shared Belief When people gather for knitting circles, pottery classes, or community art-making, they are creating intentional community around focal practice. The practice itself becomes the shared language—not requiring agreement on why it matters, but creating space where a shared creative interest is taken seriously.

Intergenerational Transmission Craft communities often span ages, allowing skill and wisdom to pass between generations. This addresses the human need to be part of something extending beyond a single individual's lifespan. This is crucial when traditional frameworks for macro-level connections have dissolved.

Alternative Values Made Visible In creative communities, slowness is valued; mistakes become a form of learning; process matters as much as product; beauty and meaning are worthy pursuits. This permission to operate by values that differ from that of mainstream culture provides its own kind of sanctuary.

Studies on crafting communities show that they provide many psychological benefits traditionally associated with religious community—belonging, purpose, values alignment, and support.[14]

The Sacred in Attention

When you sit down to knit, the yarn is ordinary fiber and the needles are mass-produced tools. Nothing about the materials is inherently sacred.

However, when you approach the practice with devotion—setting aside time, bringing your full attention, honoring the rhythms, caring about the process—the ordinary becomes a container for something more. The yarn becomes a medium for meditation. The needles become instruments of contemplation.

Research on mindfulness and everyday activities shows that quality of attention matters more than the content for creating experiences of meaning and transcendence.[15] It is not necessarily what you're doing, but how you are doing it that creates the experience people describe as touching the sacred.

This is an invitation to consider how we might create new containers for meaning that empower us to recognize and cultivate experiences of transcendence through attention and intention.

What This Means for Creative Practice

If you recognize this cultural liminal space—moving between frameworks, navigating new terrains without clear maps, sensing something's missing even when everything's functional—creative practice might offer what you are seeking. Rather than viewing crafting as answer or solution, try considering it as an intentional path and practice.

This requires approaching craft differently than contemporary culture typically positions it. You are not taking up knitting to produce sweaters efficiently or to check "creative hobby" off your optimization list. Rather, you are engaging a contemplative practice that happens to work through materials.

Research on what makes activities meaningful suggests several factors that creative practice naturally includes:[16]

Autonomy: You choose the practice, the pace, the direction 
Competence: You develop skill through sustained effort
Connection: You participate in lineages and communities
Contribution: What you make can serve others
Meaning: The practice connects to questions that matter

Studies show that activities incorporating these elements create a stronger sense of purpose and life satisfaction than those focused solely on achievement or consumption.

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Beginning Your Practice

Start with one modality that calls you—not because it's productive or impressive, but because something within you responds to the materials or the process.

Set aside time that is protected from productivity demands. Even thirty minutes weekly, held consistently, creates ritual and rhythm. Research on habit formation shows that regularity matters more than duration for establishing meaningful practice.[17]

Notice what the practice gives you beyond the final result:

• Does time feel different?
• Do you access states of consciousness you don't reach otherwise?
• Does meaning surface?
• Are questions clarified?

Studies on contemplative practice show these subjective experiences—not measurable outputs—predict whether people maintain a practice long-term and whether the practice contributes to their wellbeing.[18]

Also consider creating within community. Shared practice amplifies the benefits. Look for craft circles or classes approaching making as meaningful practice, not just skill development.

Finally, be patient. Contemplative practices work slowly, building capacity over time. Trust the process even when—especially when—it feels ordinary and undramatic.

Tools for Threshold Times

At Ethos of Care, we design products specifically for people navigating these cultural liminal spaces. Our Flourish Meditation Coloring Cards aren't just pretty designs—they are tools we developed based on research around bilateral movements, nervous system regulation, and contemplative practice.

Each card pairs a pattern (designed to engage focused attention) with an affirmation (because sometimes you need words too). They are small enough to use anywhere, simple enough for 2 AM when anxiety hits, and research-informed enough to take seriously.

The Promise of Making

Your hands know things your mind may not have caught up to yet. The materials are waiting. The practice is calling.

The meaning you are seeking might be found not through thinking harder, achieving more, or finding perfect frameworks, but through devoted attention to the simple act of making.

Making is one of the most ancient human ways of touching what matters, creating meaning, and knowing ourselves as participants in the unfolding story of creation. Whether you frame that theologically, philosophically, or simply as attention to what's real—the practice works.

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Explore Further:

• Flourish Meditation Coloring Cards - Contemplative practice for uncertain times
• The Science Behind Why Creative Rituals Help Guide Us Through Liminal Spaces - An exploration of threshold times
  

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References

[1] Taylor, C. (1991). The Malaise of Modernity. House of Anansi Press.

[2] Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

[3] Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books.

[4] Crawford, M. B. (2009). Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Penguin Press.

[5] Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.

[6] Borgmann, A. (1984). Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry. University of Chicago Press.

[7] Malafouris, L. (2013). How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. MIT Press.

[8] Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2002). The pursuit of meaningfulness in life. In C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of Positive Psychology. Oxford University Press.

[9] Mauss, M. (1954). The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Free Press.

[10] Rosa, H. (2013). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press.

[11] Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine Publishing.

[12] Hobson, N. M., et al. (2018). The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(3), 260-284.

[13] Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529.

[14] Riley, J., et al. (2013). The benefits of knitting for personal and social wellbeing in adulthood. British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 76(2), 50-57.

[15] Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(4), 822-848.

[16] Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.

[17] Lally, P., et al. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.

[18] Carmody, J., & Baer, R. A. (2008). Relationships between mindfulness practice and levels of mindfulness. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 22(3), 199-208.

[19] Images by Pure Julia.