The long middle
On the World Cup, the road of trials, and learning to stay in the middle
On the eleventh of June, México opened the World Cup at the Estadio Azteca and beat South Africa two goals to none. For one evening the whole country was loud in the same direction. Green jerseys filled the streets and the plazas, and you could hear it even here in Querétaro, where the rains have started again and the afternoons turn gray and heavy by late afternoon. Then the match ended, the noise died down, and everyone looked at the calendar. The next game is on the eighteenth. The days in between have little to do with soccer and everything to do with how we get through change.
A tournament has a long middle that no one puts on a poster. The opening is all arrival and the final is all consequence, and the group stage sits between them, three weeks of waiting when nothing is decided and anything can still happen. A team can play well and still go home, and another can start badly and still go through. The middle holds both at once, and a whole country settles into not knowing, watching the standings, doing the math, carrying its hope and its worry together.
Joseph Campbell had a name for this part of the journey. After the call and the first crossing comes the road of trials, the long stretch where you are tested over and over and the ending is still unknown. We remember the departure and the return, the big beginning and the homecoming, because those make the good photographs. The road of trials makes poor ones. It is repetitive and uncertain and often lonely, and it is also where the change actually happens. Whoever comes home different was made different in the middle, long before they arrived.
I have spent my working life with people who are in the middle of their own changes, and the same thing comes up again and again. The man leaving a long marriage, the woman starting a new career at fifty-five, the family still learning how a new country works. Each of them can tell you about the call that started it, and each can picture, more or less, where they hope to end up. What wears them down is the middle, the months and sometimes years after the old life has let go and before the new one has arrived. That part asks for a kind of patience almost no one is taught.
Milton Erickson trusted that the body works on its own clock, slower and steadier than the hurried mind above it. When we rush the middle and force an answer too early, we tend to land somewhere thin and have to begin again. The better practice is to let things stay unsettled long enough for something solid to grow. That takes a real, physical willingness to keep showing up to a life you cannot yet see the end of, the way a team trains and rests and prepares between games it has not played.
Carl Jung wrote about holding the tension between opposites instead of resolving it too quickly, and James Hollis writes often about the courage it takes to stay with the harder, larger task rather than grab the nearest comfort. Both of them were describing the discipline of the middle. The temptation is always to end the discomfort early, to call a change complete before it has finished its work on us. The rains here in Querétaro make the same point. They come when they come, and the land simply waits, dry and ready, until they do.
There is something good in watching a whole country wait together. A World Cup takes everyone’s private uncertainty and turns it into one shared thing, and the waiting gets easier when it is done in company. We handle the unknown better with other people around, and a plaza full of strangers in the same jersey is a plain reminder of that. Whatever middle you are living through right now, you were always meant to have company in it. The people who can wait there with you, without pushing you toward an ending, are worth more than any advice.
If you are in a stretch like this, here is a small practice for the week. Once a day, name the middle you are standing in, plainly and without apology, and then ask what it wants from you instead of how fast you can be done with it. The question tends to loosen something. The middle stops feeling like an obstacle on the way to the part that counts and starts to feel like the part that counts.
One last question. Where in your own life are you in the long middle right now, after the call and before the arrival, with the ending still honestly unknown? What changes when you treat that middle as the place where the real work gets done? The group stage will be over soon enough, and so will yours. Let it shape you while it lasts.
If any of this sounds like where you are, my book A Life Aligned covers the same ground in more depth, the slow, physical work of becoming who you are through the changes of a life. It is out in paperback, as an eBook on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and other stores, and now as an audiobook.
— Mark
A Life Aligned is a companion for anyone in the middle of a real life change, a guide to the slow work of becoming who you are. Available in paperback, as an eBook on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and other stores, and as an audiobook.
Mark Arcuri is a psychology professional, integrative coach, educator, and author based in Querétaro, México, where he writes Letters from the Interior. He serves as Associate Dean of the BS Integrative Health program at Walden University.
If someone you know is in a long middle of their own, pass this letter along.