Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

He has half the deed done, who has Made a beginning. —HORACE Epistles1

Without fully realizing it, we tend to imagine that “psychological obstetricians” can get us out, whack us on the back, and get us functioning again.

The English novelist John Galsworthy was surely right when he wrote that “the beginnings . . . of all human undertakings are untidy.”2

The lesson in all such experiences is that when we are ready to make a new beginning, we will shortly find an opportunity. The same event could be a real new beginning in one situation and an interesting but unproductive by-way in another.

This is why in archaic cultures the myths describing the creation of the world are recited over a sick person. As Mircea Eliade has written: By making the patient symbolically . . . contemporary with Creation, he lived again in the initial plentitude of being. One does not repair a worn-out organism, it must be re-made; the patient needs to be born again; he needs, as it were, to recover the whole energy and potency that a being has at the moment of its birth.3

The most important of these signals begins as a faint intimation of something different, a new theme in the music, a strange fragrance on the breeze.

Sometimes, the hint comes in the form of a dream. That should remind us how often traditional cultures taught their people to watch their dreams for signs of guidance.

woman of forty, for example, just divorced, the mother of three children, one of them seriously handicapped. With no college education, she had every reason to settle for the immediate solution of office work at a low salary. But she wanted to be a college teacher! “That will take years,” everyone warned her. But one step at a time, she followed a path that led her through college, graduate school, a frustrating period of temporary jobs, and finally to the teaching job she had dreamed of.

impact was astounding. By the end of the month, his mind was made up. The shift wasn’t easy, however, for his life had to be rebuilt economically. It meant different kinds of investments, a smaller house, a new loan to finish paying off the kids’ college tuition.

I emphasize vocational changes in these examples because it is when things come down to money and time that people always say they just can’t manage to launch the new beginning they dream of. Examples of this sort are much commoner that most people realize, for until recently the image of the linear lifetime and the linear career has so dominated our outlook and defined our expectations that we have underestimated how often people do make radical new beginnings during adulthood. Nor have we realized how often important accomplishments come from such turning points.

We all learned in school, for example, about Abraham Lincoln’s youth—the poverty and the ambition and the sense of responsibility he had as a frontier boy. The history books imply that our greatest president was shaped by his childhood. But that childhood produced a young adult who was unremarkable—a man who did this and that, and had a difficult marriage, a mediocre term in Congress, and terrible bouts of what today would be diagnosed as depression. It was not from boyhood but from a profound transition in his thirties that this man stepped forth into history. It was only then that he discovered where he was going and what he could really do. Out of a dark time in his own inner neutral zone, Lincoln found the seeds of his future; and from there he began a rapid rise to the presidency that no one could have predicted for him only a few years earlier.

But there is a danger in citing too many of these examples, for it suggests that only great people or unusually talented ones can follow the path of self-renewal through transition; it suggests that only special people can make new beginnings during the adult years. And because such people became so successful, it is easy to imagine that the doubts and confusions we feel when we are trying to make a new beginning are significant evidence of bad timing, lack of potential, or having taken a wrong direction.

New beginnings are accessible to everyone, and everyone has trouble with them.

To act on what we really want is the same as saying that “I, a unique person, exist.”

To make a successful new beginning, it is important to do more than simply persevere. It is important to understand what it is within us that undermines our resolve and casts doubt on our plans. One member of the transition class was close to the truth when he said, “There’s a tough old immigrant inside me who is scared to death of anything new and who believes that the only way to survive is to do everything the old, slow, safe way.” This man was a scientist whose parents were immigrants who had lived out their lives in the narrow corridors of a city ghetto. Although he had made many external changes, he still lived by the safety code that they had taught him in childhood. No chances—take no chances.

They find that this inner reactionary (as one woman called it) is stirring up trouble in a relationship.

Or such people may find themselves plunging unexpectedly into a depression at the prospect of a new beginning—and find on closer examination that the inner reactionary is muttering, “All right, if you won’t do what I say, I’ll bring this show to a standstill.”