Time & Perspective Quote by Barbara de Angelis

De Angelis plants her flag in the messy middle, reframing transition not as a pit stop but as the main event. The line works because it refuses the comfort of fixed identity: "what you once were" and "who you are now becoming" are tidy, narratable selves, the versions you can explain at a dinner table. The "moment in between" is the part you can’t package. That’s where the anxiety lives, but also the oxygen.

Calling it "the dance of life" is doing a lot of quiet persuasion. Dance implies rhythm, improvisation, missteps that are still part of the choreography. It’s a subtle argument against the self-help impulse to treat growth like a linear renovation project: demolish the old you, unveil the new you, post the before-and-after. De Angelis instead elevates the liminal state - uncertainty, experimentation, relapse, awkwardness - into something active and even sensual. Not a problem to solve, but a practice to inhabit.

The subtext is compassionate but also demanding: if life is happening most intensely in the in-between, then waiting to feel "ready" becomes a form of avoidance. It’s a nudge to stop outsourcing meaning to future milestones (the promotion, the healed relationship, the fully confident self) and to recognize that becoming is not a hallway you rush through. It’s the room. Contextually, this sits squarely in late-20th-century personal-growth culture, where psychological vocabulary and spiritual metaphor merge to make change feel less like failure and more like movement.