Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

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.