The Best Word for Sharing

 Our---that was was the word of the day from Mr. Oliver's The Dictionary Story as I was about to head out the door for work this morning. The short definition indicated it was the best word to refer to sharing.

It felt both appropriate and highly comforting to have my eyes land on this. The night had given me troubled dreams before I awoke at 3 am, of being in what has come to be called liminal spaces. If you don't know what that means, it's a meme that has arisen in social media derived from gaming (video games that is).

There's a wikipedia article about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space_(aesthetic). Underlining here is mine:

In Internet aesthetics, liminal spaces are empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Liminal spaces are commonly places of transition, pertaining to the concept of liminality.

Research from the Journal of Environmental Psychology has indicated that liminal spaces may appear eerie or strange because they fall into an uncanny valley of architecture and physical places. An article from Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture has attributed this eeriness to familiar places lacking their usually observed context. A pillar of liminal spaces is the absence of living things, particularly other people, with the implication that the viewer is alone; this lack of presence is characteristic of spaces that are "liminal in a temporal way, that occupy a space between use and disuse, past and present, transitioning from one identity to another."

The aesthetic gained popularity in 2019 after a post on 4chan depicting a liminal space called the Backrooms went viral. Since then, liminal space images have been posted across the internet, including on Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok.

My liminal space in dreams is usually a concrete stairwell, perhaps leading to parking garage. Last night it was a large industrial facility with concrete hallways and many doors. It feels similar the Backrooms, described in the passage above. Something else was there, something perhaps malevolent, and I was fearful of it, but it my dreams I sought to yell at it, unseen around the corners of hallways,  as one would confront a bear in the woods.

The vividness of the dream left my somewhat dazed, perhaps. It took me longer than normal to wake up. I sat on the porch for almost forty minutes before I bothered to make coffee. Even driving into campus just now, my mind felt slow.

Our---the cooperative experience of an activity with another person. The feeling it engenders is the opposite of the liminal space, which is experienced as a frightening solitary experience. Even before I knew about this concept, I understood it through dreams, where I would be with other people, or another person, and they would disappear and I would be alone, wondering how to reconnect to other people, or find someone who I lost. Something about that feels fundamental to my experience of life.

The idea that there is an our to the experience of America, as I mentioned, is something that now feels elusive, as I mentioned in a previous. Perhaps some interesting thoughts will emerge today, as the day wears on, and the fog of the liminal spaces clears from my mind.