Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

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.