The new year arrives, and with it, thresholds everywhere. Some of us step boldly into 2026. Some pause at the edge, one foot tentatively extended. Some drift back to familiar ground before trying again.
Watch an infant encountering a threshold…a doorway, a step, a textured surface where carpet meets tile…and you may get to see all of this. The lean forward, the retreat, the whole body’s conversation with uncertainty and possibility.
Let’s look again at the cover picture…one foot on familiar ground, one lifted toward the unknown. A butterfly spreads its wings across her chest as she stands poised between inside and outside. She’s not performing this moment. She’s living it, discovering it, wholly present to the question of what comes next.
I recently read an article in the New York Times about choreographers and musicians who are “discovering” what happens when they really watch babies move. One quote made me smile: “Babies don’t perform movement—they discover it.”
For those of us who have studied infant observation through RIE, this isn’t news. It’s what we’ve known all along. But it’s heartening to see others finding their way to this same profound truth, to see the wider world beginning to notice what becomes visible when we slow down and truly watch.
The article’s closing thought struck deeper: “Whatever space we’re in before consciousness or birth, babies are as close to that space as anyone will ever come—and when they move, I think we see that most clearly. Maybe watching them dance helps us learn something about the before, the between or the unknown, the thing we call the soul.”
The before. The between. The unknown.
Isn’t that exactly where we all stand at the start of a new year? Or honestly, at any given moment: a threshold between what was and what might be?
Watch this. Same child, same day, two thresholds. One she navigates on hands and feet, body low and steady, back and forth, before walking through. The other she walks through upright, more boldly. Neither approach is better. Both are authentic responses to what her body knows in that moment about the territory ahead.
A few days later, she navigates another threshold…this one in her familiar RIE playspace…but in a new way…out the wide door to the deck, walking away from her mother for one of the first times in class.
Infants don’t perform their approach to newness. They don’t pretend confidence they don’t feel. They don’t shame themselves for choosing the steadier path when that’s what feels right. Watch a baby at a threshold, and you see the body’s honest intelligence at work: gathering information, testing possibilities, honoring both caution and curiosity.
As we enter 2026, perhaps we can take our cue from these young teachers. To approach our thresholds, whatever they are, with the same unselfconscious authenticity. To honor both our boldness and our hesitation. To trust that sometimes we’ll walk through upright and sometimes we’ll take it low and steady, and both are exactly right.
To remember that discovery, not performance, is what matters.
Here’s to all of us, standing at our various thresholds. May we meet them with the grace and honesty of a child at an open door: one foot lifted, butterfly wings ready, wholly present to the moment of in-between.