The Season of Almost: Preparing for a Big Culmination and the Threshold Beyond
- Suzanne Butler
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
The Almost
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles in when you are preparing for something big. Not the calm-before-the-storm kind, not the frantic rustle of last-minute panic, but a softer, stranger stillness. It’s the feeling of standing in the doorway with your hand hovering over the light switch, knowing you’re about to leave the room you’ve lived in for a long time, but not quite ready to turn the light off just yet. This is the season of almost. Almost finished. Almost there. Almost becoming whoever you’ll be on the other side of this.
I find myself here now, in the final stages of preparing for my PhD viva, holding years of work, thought, doubt, devotion, and persistence in my hands like something both solid and strangely fragile. It’s not just an event on the calendar; it’s a culmination, a gathering-up of everything that has led me to this point. And yet, even as I prepare, there is an awareness that this moment is not only about what I’ve done, but about what is quietly loosening its grip. The routines, the identity, the familiar shape of striving toward this particular horizon are already beginning to blur at the edges.
What strikes me most about moments like this is how deeply personal they are, even when they look similar from the outside. Preparation doesn’t feel the same for everyone. Anticipation doesn’t land in the body in a single, universal way. Some people feel steady and grounded, others jittery and undone, others quietly thrilled in a way that surprises them. Often it’s all of those things at once. There is excitement here for me, yes, a hum of possibility and relief, but also tenderness, and a gentle reverence for the fact that I am crossing a threshold I once stood very far away from, wondering if I’d ever reach it.
This space before the crossing asks something subtle of us. It asks us to stay present without rushing ahead, to honour what has been built without clinging too tightly to it, to let ourselves feel the fullness of anticipation without demanding certainty about what comes next. It is a pause thick with meaning, and if we let it, it can teach us how to stand at the edge of change with curiosity rather than fear, with openness rather than urgency.
Preparation as Devotion
Preparation, when it stretches across months or years, becomes something more than a checklist. It stops being about readiness in the practical sense and starts to feel almost devotional. There is a rhythm to it, a returning again and again to the work, to the questions, to the quiet inner voice that says, keep going. In this way, preparing for the viva has mirrored so many other long journeys in life, where the point is not just to arrive, but to be shaped by the act of walking toward something with intention.
What we rarely talk about is how preparation changes us before the culmination ever arrives. It teaches us how to sit with uncertainty, how to trust ourselves a little more deeply, how to tolerate the discomfort of not yet knowing how things will unfold. It asks for patience, and patience, I’ve learned, is not passive at all. It’s an active, living practice, one that involves showing up even on the days when motivation feels thin and faith in the process wobbles. In that sense, preparation is not just something we do, it’s something we become.
This is where the threshold begins to make itself known. Long before the moment itself, there’s a subtle loosening of attachment to who we were when we started. The person who began this work is not the same person standing here now, and that truth carries both comfort and grief. There is pride in recognising growth, in seeing how much has been learned and integrated, but there is also a tenderness for earlier versions of ourselves who didn’t yet know how strong they were going to have to be. Preparation holds all of that, the discipline and the doubt, the excitement and the fatigue, the moments of clarity and the long stretches of simply trusting that something meaningful is unfolding, even when it doesn’t feel particularly magical.
And perhaps this is why moments of culmination can feel so emotionally layered. They don’t just mark an ending; they reveal the depth of our commitment to the path that led us here. Standing on the edge of what’s next, we carry not only the work itself, but the quiet courage it took to keep preparing when the outcome was still uncertain. There is something profoundly human in that, and something worthy of being honoured, before we rush ahead into whatever comes after.
Standing at the Threshold
There is a strange elasticity to time when you reach a threshold. The future tugs gently forward, full of possibility and unanswered questions, while the past lingers, asking to be acknowledged before it releases you. This is the space I’m inhabiting now, not quite finished, not quite begun, aware that once this moment passes, there will be no way to return to it in quite the same way. Thresholds are not meant to be rushed through. They are meant to be felt.
What I’m noticing most is how tempting it can be to skip ahead, to focus entirely on what comes next, as though the value of this moment lies only in its ability to deliver us somewhere else. But there is something quietly powerful about letting ourselves stand here, fully. About recognising that the act of arriving at the edge is an achievement in itself. The viva, like so many culminating moments, is not a test of worth or legitimacy, but a marker, a pause in the long conversation between effort and becoming.
For anyone reading this who is preparing for their own “something big,” whether it has a name or remains softly undefined, I want to say this: your threshold will feel like yours, and yours alone. You might feel exhilarated, or tender, or restless, or unexpectedly calm. You might oscillate between all of it in the space of a single afternoon. None of these responses are wrong. They are simply signs that you are paying attention, that you are present to the gravity of the moment you are approaching.
And perhaps that is the invitation of thresholds everywhere, not just mine. To meet them with honesty and integrity; with curiosity rather than control. To trust that whatever we are carrying into the next chapter has been earned through the slow, often unseen work of preparation. We don’t need to know exactly who we will be on the other side in order to take the step. It is enough to recognise that we are ready in the only way that truly matters: we have shown up, we have stayed, and we have allowed ourselves to be changed along the way.
Carrying What Comes With You
One of the quieter realisations that has surfaced for me in this stage of preparing is that nothing is ever crossed alone. Even when the moment itself feels solitary, even when the door closes and it’s just you and the thing you’ve been working toward, you arrive carrying an entire landscape behind you. Every late night, every moment of doubt that didn’t stop you, every small decision to keep going when it would have been easier to turn away, all of it comes too. The threshold doesn’t strip you bare; it reveals what you’ve already gathered.
There is comfort in remembering this, especially when anticipation starts to tip into self-questioning. Preparation has a way of teaching us far more than we realise at the time. Skills, certainly, and knowledge, but also resilience, discernment, and a deeper relationship with our own inner authority. These are not things that disappear once the culmination arrives. They are portable. They move with us into whatever shape the next chapter takes, even if that shape remains hazy for now.
I think this is why encouragement feels more honest than reassurance in moments like these. Encouragement doesn’t promise that everything will be easy or perfectly resolved. It simply reminds us that we are not empty-handed at the edge. That we have evidence, lived and embodied, of our ability to meet challenges with care and persistence. The work has already done some of its work on us.
As I stand here, on the brink of this particular ending and beginning, I’m trying to let that be enough. To trust that the preparation has been meaningful not only because of what it leads to, but because of who it has helped me become. And if you are standing at your own threshold right now, holding your breath in the almost, I hope you can feel that too. You are allowed to pause here. You are allowed to feel everything. And you are more prepared than you think.
Before the Next Step
Perhaps this is all any of us are ever really doing in moments like these, learning how to pause without freezing, how to stand at the edge without demanding a map. There is a tenderness in this space that doesn’t ask to be solved or explained. It simply asks to be noticed. To be allowed. To be held with the same care we’ve given to the long road that led us here.
So if you are reading this while preparing for your own quiet culmination, whatever form it takes, I hope you can let yourself linger for a moment longer on the threshold. Not to delay what’s coming, but to honour what has already been lived. You don’t need to rush forward to prove readiness, and you don’t need to look back to justify how you arrived. This moment, exactly as it is, is enough.
When the next step comes, as it inevitably will, you’ll take it carrying more wisdom than you realise. Until then, may you trust the pause, feel the anticipation without letting it harden into fear, and remember that becoming is rarely loud. Often, it happens quietly, right here, in the breath before the door opens.
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