Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

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.