Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

AMERICANS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IN TRANSITION. Whereas Old World families trace themselves back to a place, New World families originate in an act of migration. Nor did the transition from an old life to a new one end when the immigrants arrived on these shores. From place to place and job to job, Americans kept moving. Drawn forward by the faith that better things lay just beyond the horizon, they lived a life marked by frequent transitions. European visitors often noted this and marveled that Americans seemed to thrive on it.

The subject of this book is the difficult process of letting go of an old situation, of suffering the confusing nowhere of in-betweenness, and of launching forth again in a new situation. Because those three phases are going to be so critical to what we are discussing, let me reiterate: All transitions are composed of (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning. Drawing on modern research into adult development, I’ll give you some useful ways of thinking about why transition occurs when it does. Recognizing that every lifetime has its own unique rhythm, Transitions provides the tools for identifying a personal developmental chronology. Cutting through the particulars of specific changes, the book identifies transition’s characteristic impact on work and relationships. Finally, it provides concrete ways for people to help themselves deal constructively with times of transition.

Throughout nature, growth involves periodic accelerations and transformations: Things go slowly for a time and nothing seems to happen—until suddenly the eggshell cracks, the branch blossoms, the tadpole’s tail shrinks away, the leaf falls, the bird molts, the hibernation begins. With us it is the same. Although the signs are less clear than in the world of feather and leaf, the functions of transition times are the same. They are key times in the natural process of development and self-renewal. Without an understanding of such natural times of transition, we are left impossibly hoping that change will bypass us and let us go on with our lives as before.

What you bring with you to a transitional situation is the style you have developed for dealing with endings. The product of early experience and late influence, this style is your own way of dealing with external circumstances and with the inner distress they stir up. Your style is likely to reflect your childhood family situation, for transitions tend to send family members off to different tasks: One person feels all the grief and anxiety for the entire group, another comforts the mourner, another takes over the routine responsibilities, and yet another goes into a sort of parody of “being in control of the situation.”

Looking back over your ending experiences, what can you say about your own style of bringing situations to a close? Is it abrupt and designed to deny the impact of the change, or is it so slow and gradual that it is hard to see that anything important is happening? Do you tend to be active or passive in these terminal situations? That is, is it your initiative that brings things to term or do events just happen to you? Some people learn early to cultivate a subtle sort of receptivity to coincidence, or they become skilled at covertly inviting other people to act upon them when change is in the wind.

So we have rule number four: First there is an ending, then a beginning, and an important empty or fallow time in between. That is the order of things in nature. Leaf-fall, winter, and then the green emerges again from the dry brown wood. Human affairs flow along similar channels, or they would if we were better able to stay in that current. But endings make us fearful.

One of the benefits to reviewing your experience of endings is to see how often they have cleared the ground for unexpected beginnings. But reviewing these elements in your past may also uncover the times when the ending did not provide a starting point, as well as times when you started a new journey without unpacking your baggage from the old one. Right now, at this new transition point in your life, remember some of these aborted transition points from your past. Poke around among them as you might explore an old house you once lived in. Some of these unfinished transitions might be ones that you could still complete, and if you did that, you would bring more energy and less anxiety to your present situation as a result. Completion may involve no more than a belated farewell, a letter, or a call to someone. It may involve an inner relinquishment of someone who outwardly you left behind years ago, or some old image of yourself, or some outlived dream or outworn belief that you have kept in your baggage long past its time. You’ll travel more easily if you lighten your load.

What are the events that have brought change into your life in the past year? And what are the areas of your life in which the changes are evident? Here are some categories and guidelines to help you answer those questions. Losses of relationships. What relationships have gone out of your life in the past year—list everything from a spouse’s death to a friend’s moving away. Include marital separations, children leaving home, or the alienation of a former friend. What about the death of a pet, or the loss of some admired hero, or anything that narrows your field of relationships? Changes in home life. Getting married or having a child; having a spouse retire, becoming ill (or recovering), returning to school, changing jobs, or going into a depression; moving to a new house or remodeling the old one; experiencing increased (or decreased) domestic tension—anything that changed the content or quality of life in your home. Personal Changes. Getting sick (or well again); experiencing notable success (or failure); changing your eating habits, sleep patterns, sexual activities; starting or stopping school; markedly changing your life-style or your appearance. Work and financial changes. Getting fired, retiring, or changing jobs; changes within your organization; an increase or decrease in income; taking on new loans or mortgages; discovering that career advancement is blocked. Inner changes. Spiritual awakening, deepening social and political awareness, or psychological insights; ...

To become a couple is to agree implicitly to play a prearranged part in another person’s story, although it sometimes takes a while to get the part down really well. It isn’t enough to follow the overt signals, for the part might be that of the person who “never does what I ask you to do.” An outsider listening to the dialogue would probably misunderstand the agreement between the two people. “He’s urging you to go out and get a job,” the outsider may say. “Why don’t you do it?” But the person knows deep down that it is not so simple—that what the other one is really saying is something like, “You poor timid soul. You can’t really face the world, can you? But that’s all right because I’ll take care of you.” This is all hidden from view, of course; or it is until one day the person—a wife in the traditional marriage—comes home and says, her heart in her throat, “Guess what. I got a job.” And he says, “You did?” And he looks at her strangely, or says, rather unconvincingly, “That’s wonderful.” In a few minutes, he’ll say, “Well, who the hell is going to pick up the stuff at the cleaners, then?”

When the first edition of this book came out, I got calls and letters from husbands or wives who announced that their spouses were in mid-life crisis (or in some other transition) and needed a talking to. I was always told that the partners in question “will listen to you.” And that they really “need help.” That may have been so, of course, but it simply won’t work to provide help that is not wanted at that point. What does work is for the partner who is aware of the transition and its implications for a relationship to begin exploring alone the question of what is ending in a relationship and what to do about it. More often than not, it turns out that the ending is not some external situation but an attitude or an assumption or a self-image that both partners have held. And the husbands or wives who were sure that their partners needed help find that the need is within themselves, that once the inner change is made by them, the other person proves to be not nearly so blind or unwilling to talk. I have come to regard it as more than likely that husbands or wives seeking help and advice for a spouse had better face their own need for help.

It helps to imagine how it would feel if you had to relinquish the same things your partner is letting go. It helps to imagine the self-doubt that an anxiety producing new beginning may be causing the other. It helps to imagine how lost and confused the other feels when long-time patterns disappear and leave only a blank page to stare at in life’s book.

To understand better what this means as well as what can be done about it, let’s return to Don, the high school teacher in transition whom we discussed in the last chapter. None of his coworkers had a clear sense of what was going on in his life, but it was obvious to everyone that Don was doing a halfhearted job of teaching. When his principal talked to him about it, Don promised to try harder and left the conference feeling scared and confused. Part of his confusion came from the gradual recognition that it wasn’t just that home issues were undermining him at work; it was that the same issues that were undermining him as a teacher were undermining him as a husband and as a father. In all areas of his life, he felt a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness. Don had unearthed a significant truth about his situation, and over the ensuing months he thought about it a great deal. In the process, he discovered one of the important transitions that is likely to take place in a person’s work life sometime after the age of forty: the transition from being motivated by the chance to demonstrate competence to being motivated by the chance to find personal meaning in the work and its results. It is the shift from the question of how to the question of why.

1. What is it time to let go of in my own life right now? This question marks the first difference between change and transition, for the latter must start with letting go. As we noted in “A Lifetime of Transitions,” we periodically reach the point where an attitude, a belief, a style of responding to challenges, a goal or a dream for the future, or an assumption about others—that served us well up to that time—simply isn’t what we need for the future.

Finding out what it is time to let go of often provides the way to initiate a transition meaningfully. Unfortunately, people are more likely to ask what new thing they can add to their lives. Even though they may get an interesting answer to that question, they won’t be able to use it to make a meaningful transition because people have to start with endings—letting go of whatever it is time to let go of—before they can make new beginnings. If they fail, they find that even “great ideas” and “really exciting possibilities” simply do not help them. So start with What is it time to let go of in my own life right now? 2. What is standing backstage, in the wings of my life, waiting to make its entrance? The answer is something internal, something subjective, although it may be presented to you as an external event or situation that brings it to your attention. If it appears in its subjective form, it may take the shape of an idea or a fantasy or a question you ask yourself: “I’ve never worked for myself before”; or “Why didn’t you ever follow up on that old idea of joining the Peace Corps?” It may present itself to you as an unexpected call from an old friend who wants to tell you about what he is doing these days, or as a fascinating story that you cut out of the paper that described a new social venture meant to divert young people from dangerous activities before it is too late.

The Hindus keyed the transition to Forest-Dwelling to the birth of one’s first grandchild—the idea being that this was when the next generation took over the Householder function within the family. In our time and place, of course, all this sounds strange. Far from stepping back to take stock, most Americans are engaged at that point in making the final assault on the mountaintop of success. But even though we don’t acknowledge this natural transition point and incorporate it into our career plans does not mean that it does not exist. It does not mean that it is banished from our lives. It simply means that when we encounter it, we are unprepared. In fact, the transitions that punctuate many people’s careers after the age of forty or forty-five are the unmarked ruins of this natural time of transition. Whether such transitions take the form of a time when everything “goes dead,” a time when things keep going wrong, a time when long-successful strategies suddenly stop working, or a time when the gray fog of depression covers whatever was once bright and interesting, this natural (if often delayed) time of transition starts with an ending, a sense of loss. And after we have acknowledged the ending, the sense of loss is replaced with emptiness, meaninglessness, a feeling that all our accomplishments actually mean very little. We say (if we have the courage to talk about the experience) that our careers aren’t going anywhere; we may wonder whether we’ve been in the wrong caree...

In the four-part Hindu scheme of life-long development that we have been drawing upon in this chapter, the final quarter of life is the time of the Sannyasin, the one who emerges from the Forest-Dweller phase of life with a much deeper understanding of life and the self than people have found in earlier phases. Just as the Householder phase represents the fruits of what was learned during the Apprentice phase, so the final chapter of the Sannyasin manifests and offers back to others what was learned during the Forest-Dweller phase.

You can learn that in the abstract earlier in life, but the only people who know it through living it over and over again are old people. Out there in The Forest, through taking stock of what life has taught them, the people who found a way to do the developmental business of mid-life discovered the deeper, the more spiritual meaning of transition. It is their own developmental task in the closing chapters of their lives to bring back that lesson to the world. It is their business during the final quarter of their life-long careers—what rubbish that careers end at any point before death!—to help people to understand the great alternating current of life, the rhythm whereby being is followed by letting go, which is followed by emptiness, which is followed by renewed energy and purpose, which is followed again by being. The old need to grow into wholeness, to combine everything (negative as well as positive) into a ripened completeness, is what I described in The Way of Transition as the product of having been through transition often enough to understand the tremendous value of living through times when letting go is the only appropriate response to life. Important though perseverance is, old people know how easily it can turn into a refusal to get the message that life is trying to deliver.

I will end this chapter by listing some questions that will help you explore the transition itself and its significance in the context of your life and career.4 Consider setting aside an hour or two to reflect on them. You will probably find it helpful to write out your responses to the questions, both to capture the results of your thinking and because putting thoughts into words forces you to slow down and to articulate more completely what is in your mind. 1. What are the indications that your work life is in transition? Remember that a change in your work life is just that—a change—and that being in transition means that something more than that is going on inwardly. It means that you have reached the point where it is time to let go of an idea or an assumption, a self-image or a dream. It means that you are moving from one chapter of your story to the next.

A transition concludes when something new emerges from your own inner neutral zone, something around which you can build your new life. What emerges is not a new job—which would be a change—but some new sense of yourself, some new reality you’re dealing with, some new idea that is moving you forward.

2. What is the developmental context of this work life transition? If you had to put into words the personal and career issues that you are dealing with at this point in your life, what would they be? If you had to give a title to the chapter of your work life that is drawing to a close, what would it be? And how about a title for this transitional introduction you are in now—what could it be called? And then—although this is hard, I know—what is the title of the next chapter of your work life? Oh, I know that you don’t know! If you did, you wouldn’t be reading this book, would you? Sure . . . sure. But consider the possibility that at some level you already know what you need to do next. Not “need” in the sense of “it would be good for you,” but “need” in the sense of what has to happen so that you can take the next step in your life. You probably think that you don’t know what the next chapter of your work life is called, but that may not be true. You may just have mis-filed the information when you received it. You put it in the file marked “A Dream I Recently Had,” or “A Crazy Idea I Just Know Wouldn’t Work . . . But That Fascinates Me,” or “The Books I’ve Found Myself Reading Recently.”

3. Imagine that you are really old. Let’s say you’re ninety. From that time in the future, you can look back on yourself now. Then you’ll know what was really going on now and even how things turned out. You may also know how they might have turned out if you had taken a different path. From that vantage point, was this present point in your life a time when it was a good idea to keep on in the same direction, or was it a time that cried out for change? And if the latter, what kind of change was called for? Looking back from age ninety, did you notice signs that pointed to the direction you ought to have taken at this point in your life, signs that may have been hard to see but that were there? And looking back from that future, what feelings do you have about your situation now? At ninety, are you sympathetic with your current confusion or impatient with your current blindness? At ninety, are you pleased by how things turned out or troubled by the nagging feeling that you missed a turn in the road back here where you’re standing now? Do you, at ninety, wish you could have encouraged your present self to take more risks? Or do you wish you could have made the present you wake up and see all that you already possessed and not risk it for something that was just ego candy?

This may remind you of the disenchantments of your own childhood : that there is no Santa Claus; that parents sometimes lie and are afraid and make stupid mistakes and like silly things; that best friends let you down. But these disenchantments did not end with childhood—nor are they over yet. The lifetime contains a long chain of disenchantments, many small and a few large: lovers who prove unfaithful, leaders who are corrupt, idols who turn out to be petty and dull, organizations that betray your trust. Worst of all, there are the times when you turned out to be what you said (and even believed) that you were not. Disenchantment, you can quickly discover, is a recurrent experience throughout the lifetime of anyone who has the courage and trust to believe in the first place.

You were a young adult then, just beginning to make your own way in the world, and you stepped forth and risked an answer: the human being, you said. You solved the riddle, the spell was broken, and in gratitude the city made you its ruler. So now the spokesman says, “Do it for us again.” [In the play, he puts it more cunningly: “Never be it our memory of thy reign that we were first restored and afterward cast down by you.”] They are asking you to keep on being the one you have always been—to live up to your public image. They ask you not to change now. And that is where the dream ends, but long after you have risen, the dream stays with you, nagging at you and drawing your attention away from the practical business of waking life. What a compelling argument: Do it again . . . don’t change now . . . live up to your image . . . keep on being the old you. The dream and its argument stir something deep in you. It blends with your daily activity in a strange way that becomes suggestive. Holding the dream shape in your mind, you think about what is going on with you just now. Dream and life correspond somehow, like a sketch and a face. And then you realize. From home, from work, even from your own mind comes the appeal to continue being the one you’ve been. Don’t change. Do the old, familiar thing again. Just when you feel drawn toward new beginnings, powerful inner and outer forces are blocking the way. The dream is your life.

One of the most important differences between a change and a transition is that changes are driven to reach a goal, but transitions start with letting go of what no longer fits or is adequate to the life stage you are in. You need to figure out for yourself what exactly that no-longer-appropriate thing is. There’s no list in the back of the book. But there is a hint that can save you considerable pain and remorse: Whatever it is, it is internal.

Looking back at the five words starting with dis, note that only “disengagement” refers exclusively to external things. “Dismantling” can be either an internal or an external process, and “disidentification,” “disenchantment,” and “disorientation” all refer to internal things. It is the internal things that really hold us to the past, and people who try to deal only with externals are people who walk out of relationships, leave jobs, move across the country . . . but who don’t end up significantly different from what and who they were before. They are likely to be people who have learned to use change to avoid transition. They storm out of a job (“rotten, no-good boss!”) rather than discover what it is in themselves that keeps finding such bosses to work for. They end another (yet another!) relationship rather than let go of the behaviors, attitudes, assumptions, and images of self or others that keep making relationships turn out this way.

In making this important point, I don’t want to leave the impression that endings never involve an external change. My point is simply that the inner ending is what initiates the transition. You see, change can lead to transition; but transition can also lead to change. People who move to another town and embrace a new way of life are making changes that will put them into transition; that is, change leads to transition. But they may have made that move because they are starting to seek different things from life, because their old habits don’t fit them any more, because inwardly they’ve become new people; that is, transition leads to change. Because of this situation, the “endings” that launch transition usually come either before or after the “endings” that are part of change. I was reminded of this recently when a friend was talking about the breakup of his marriage. “But, you know, it really ended quite a while before she left,” he said. “In fact, it was over months before, but I wasn’t ready to face that fact. It was only when she actually walked out that I could admit it was over.” As I listened to him, I thought back to the day we had met for lunch a couple of weeks after his wife had left. I remembered how devastated he was, how confused.

Endings are, let’s remember, experiences of dying. They are ordeals, and sometimes they challenge so basically our sense of who we are that we believe they will be the end of us. This is where an understanding of endings and some familiarity with the old passage rituals can be helpful. For as Mircea Eliade, one of the greatest students of these rituals, has written, “In no rite or myth do we find the initiatory death as something final, but always as the condition sine qua non of a transition to another mode of being, a trial indispensable of regeneration; that is, to the beginning of a new life.”5 Even though we are all likely to view an ending as the conclusion of the situation it terminates, it is also—and it is too bad that we don’t have better ways of reminding ourselves of this—the initiation of a process. We have it backwards. Endings are the first, not the last, act of the play.

IN OTHER TIMES AND PLACES, THE PERSON IN TRANSITION left the village and went into an unfamiliar stretch of forest or desert. There the person would remain for a time, removed from the old connections, bereft of the old identities, and stripped of the old reality. This was a time “between dreams” in which fundamental chaos of the world’s beginnings welled up and obliterated all forms. It was a place without a name—an empty space in the world and the lifetime where a new sense of self could gestate. One of the difficulties of being in transition in the modern world is that we have lost our appreciation for this gap in the continuity of existence. For us, “emptiness” represents only the absence of something. So when what’s missing is something as important as relatedness and purpose and reality, we try to find ways of replacing these missing elements as quickly as possible. That state of affairs, we imagine, cannot be an important part of the transition process; we hope it can only be a temporary, if unfortunate, situation to be endured.

If we do tell people where we are going, they ask in genuine puzzlement, “What are you going to do there all alone?” We hardly know what to answer, though, for we are heading down a dark pathway in our lives. “I want time to think things over, I guess,” we say a little lamely. But then it turns out that once we are out there, we don’t really think in any way that produces definite results. Instead, we walk the beaches or the back streets. We sit in the park or the movie theater. We watch the people and the clouds. “I didn’t do much of anything,” we report upon our return. And we feel a little defensive, as though we had failed to deliver on our promise. You should not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out during your transition points, for the neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of your everyday existence. The activities of your ordinary life keep you “you” by presenting you with a set of signals that are difficult to respond to in any but the old way. Only in the apparently aimless activity of your time alone can you do the important inner business of self-transformation. But you don’t do it as you do ordinary things, for it is in the walking, watching, making coffee, counting the birds on the phone wire, studying the cracks in the plaster ceiling over the bed, dreaming, and waiting for God-knows-what to happen that you are carrying on the basic industry of the neutral zone, which is attentive inactivity and rituali...

The first of the neutral zone activities or functions is surrender —one must give in to the emptiness and stop struggling to escape it. This is not easy, although it is made easier by an understanding of why the emptiness is essential. There are three main reasons for the emptiness between the old life and the new. First, the process of transformation is essentially a death and rebirth process rather than one of mechanical modification.

For “what to do” consists not of ways out but of ways in; that is, it involves ways of amplifying and making more real the essential neutral zone experience. The way in is the way out, as it happens. When the wheels spin in loose gravel, you need more weight. Tempting though it may be to wait for the experience to pass, it is one of those things that will stick around until it gets your attention. So here are some practical suggestions about how to find the meaning while in the neutral zone—and thus how to shorten the time you spend there. Accept your need for this time in the neutral zone. Understand why you are in this situation, why your life seems to be stalled at the very time changes are taking place around you. Being able to make sense out of your experience at this time is very important, for otherwise the neutral zone can feel like a dead-end road. Understanding what the neutral zone is and why it is there can keep you from falling into one of the two snares that people—especially people upset with and anxious about the transition they are in—fall into when they are in the neutral zone. Let’s call them the traps of fast forward and reverse.

At the same time, do keep moving. Because the opposite temptation—to try to undo the changes and put things back the way they were before the transition started—is equally misguided.

Find a regular time and place to be alone. People in transition are often still involved in activities and relationships that continue to bombard them with cues irrelevant to their emerging needs. Because a person is likely to feel lonely in such a situation, the temptation is to seek more and better contact with others; but the real need is for a genuine sort of aloneness in which inner signals can make themselves heard. Doing housework after the kids leave for school or paperwork with the office door shut are not being alone in the sense I am talking about. The old passage rituals provided the person with this experience of deep aloneness, often in a wilderness setting. (Interestingly, the Hebrew word for the “wilderness” in which Jesus, Moses, and Buddha spent time during critical periods of their lives is the same word that means “sanctuary.” This unmappable “nowhere” was also, as several of these heroes were explicitly told, holy ground.) Traditionally, time spent in such “sanctuaries” was a continuous period; but you may have to plan your time to accommodate your own life situation. One person manages that by getting up every morning forty-five minutes ahead of the rest of the family and sitting quietly in the living room with a cup of coffee. Another jogs regularly after work for half an hour. Another plays cassettes of ocean sounds and temple bells on his car stereo whenever he drives alone. Still another has cleaned out a little storage room off the upstairs hall ...

Begin a log of neutral zone experiences. Lost in the welter of moment-to-moment incident, the important experiences of the neutral

What you want to capture is a day or a week of your experience: What was really going on, or even what was “trying to happen?” What was your mood? What were you thinking about, perhaps without realizing it, at the time? What puzzling or unusual things happened? What decisions do you wish you could have made? What dreams do you remember having?

Think of what would be unlived in your life if it ended today. Suppose a tree fell on you right now or that you suffered heart failure. There. It’s all over. Your life is finished. Whatever you’ve done is the you that goes down in the record books, and everything you might have done vanishes with the mind that considered it.

The place should be an unfamiliar one and free of the ordinary influences from your daily situation, as was the initiate’s journey of old. The simpler and quieter the setting, the more chance you will have to attend to your inner business. Your food should be simple, and your meals should be small. Leave at home the wonderful novel you’ve been meaning to read, and don’t distract yourself with other entertainment. Take along a notebook to jot in, but don’t feel that you have to write anything substantial while you are there.

If it appeals to you, keep a vigil during one of your nights—that is, stay awake all night and do nothing more demanding than keeping a fire going or getting something to drink occasionally. The idea is to stay awake, so you’ll want to sit up rather than lie down, and it will help to get up and walk around from time to time.

There are no secrets to taking a neutral zone retreat, no great topics that you are supposed to meditate upon. You are simply living for a little while in a setting that corresponds to your position in life. You’ve removed the old reality glasses so that you can see the world anew. For this special time, take note of your hunches and the coincidences that happen and the crazy ideas that occur to you and the dreams that you remember for those first few seconds in the morning. If you think of small symbolic actions you could perform in this place, go ahead and do them.

It often happens, however, that the external ending and the new beginning stand side-by-side with no room for a neutral space between them. You move from one town to another and the new life begins. Or from one job to another with no time off between them. Or a relationship begins, but there is no real ending to being alone. You are likely to be well into the new beginning before realizing that it is all strange and unreal. You probably say then that you “aren’t used to the new situation yet,” and it is true that things will seem less strange when the setting and the cues are more familiar. But it is also true that the strangeness comes from a belated encounter with the neutral zone.

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

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. The difference is whether the event is “keyed” or “coded” to that transition point, the way that electronic key cards are set to open a particular hotel room door. When the card code matches, the door opens and the whole thing happens as if it were scripted. When it doesn’t match, the event is just an event and you are still in the neutral zone. The neutral zone simply hasn’t finished with you yet.

This woman, like most of us, was looking too literally at the signs her life was providing her. She wanted to be an artist and she expected a signal, yea or nay. She wanted an “answer,” like someone giving her a set of paints, and so she almost overlooked seeing that she was being given a path to follow. It was almost as though her dream had said, “Don’t be something, do something.” It was only when she stopped trying to be the artist that she began to explore the strange corridor in her life that she had never noticed before and found in the half-buried world of the little girl a way of looking at things that unlocked her natural talent and aligned her with her future.

The truth is otherwise, and anyone who is trying to launch a new beginning needs to understand that. New beginnings are accessible to everyone, and everyone has trouble with them. Much as we may wish to make a new beginning, some part of us resists doing so as though we were making the first step towards disaster. Everyone has a slightly different version of these anxieties and confusions, but in one way or another they all arise from the fear that real change destroys the old ways that we have learned to equate to “who we are” and “what we need.” To act on what we really want is the same as saying that “I, a unique person, exist.” It is to assert that we are on our own in a much deeper sense than we ever imagined when we were originally setting up shop as adults. That earlier process involved only independence; this involves autonomy and the firm individual purpose on which that is based.

It is as though each of us had some inner figure whose idea of caring for us involved only taking us into protective custody whenever we threatened in the transition process to become too autonomous. Some people find the figure activated whenever risk is involved; others experience the inner sabotage whenever they try to come in from the cold and settle down. One person’s safety involves inactivity and another’s involves perpetual motion; but either way, a new beginning upsets a long-standing arrangement.

Unfortunately, there is no psychological test you can take at such times. It is often difficult to be sure whether some path leads forward or back, and it may be necessary to follow it for a little way to be sure. But there are two signs that are worth looking for before you start. The first is the reaction of people who know you well: not whether they approve or disapprove, but whether they see what you propose to do as something new or simply a replay of an old pattern. The second indication comes from the transition process itself: Have you really moved through endings into the neutral zone and found there the beginning you now want to follow, or is this “beginning” a way of avoiding an ending or aborting the neutral zone experience?

This is where the third thing to do is important: Take things step by step and resist the siren song that sings about some other route where everything goes smoothly and events are always exciting and meaningful. In making a beginning, you can become so invested in the results that whatever you have to do to reach them looks pretty insignificant. Trudging from appointment to appointment, licking stamps, adding columns of figures, making reminder phone calls, and explaining your idea for the hundredth time—these are the trivia from which vital new ventures finally emerge. But by comparison with the goal, they seem hopelessly dull.

As a wonderful Zen saying expresses it, “After enlightenment, the laundry.” Endings and beginnings, emptiness and germination in between : That is the shape of the transition periods in our lives, and these times come far more frequently in adulthood and cut far more deeply into it than most of us imagined they would. But the same process is also going on continuously throughout our lives. As humankind once knew and celebrated, it is the same rhythm that puts us to sleep at night and wakes us in the morning after a dark time full of half-remembered and enigmatic clues. It is what carries us through the turning year to an ending that opens to yet another new beginning. And so it is with our lives—a dozen little endings, hardly noticed in the day-to-day rush, plunge us into little wildernesses ; and a dozen little beginnings take shape in confusion and emerge unexpectedly into clear form. (“Where did that idea come from?” “When did you decide that?”) Endings and beginnings, with emptiness and germination in between. That basic shape is so essential to growth that we must learn to recognize it in our lives.