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Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more, he loves it; for the instability, instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.
de Tocqueville, in 1831:
When he was fifty, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most famous American writer of his day, went back for a visit to his hometown of Portland, Maine. While there, he wrote a poem called “Changed”; here are the opening stanzas: From the outskirts of the town, Where of old the mile-stone stood, Now a stranger, looking down, I behold the shadowy crown Of the dark and haunted wood. It is changed, or am I changed? Ah! The oaks are fresh and green, But the friends with whom I ranged Through their thickets are estranged By the years that intervene.
To feel as though everything is “up in the air,” as one so often does during times of personal transition, is endurable if it means something—if it is part of a movement toward a desired end. But if it is not related to some larger and beneficial pattern, it simply becomes distressing.
All transitions are composed of (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning.
“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. . . . “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present,” Alice replied rather shyly, “at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” —LEWIS CARROLL Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one—not just outwardly, but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are.
We feel these unexpected losses because, to an extent that we seldom realize, we come to identify ourselves with the circumstances of our lives. Who we think we are is partly defined by our roles and relationships, those we like as well as those we don’t. But the bonds go deeper even than that. Our whole way of being—the personal style that makes you recognizably “you” and me “me”—is developed within and adjusted to fit a given life pattern. The very complaining that we do is part of that style.
Although it is advantageous to understand your own style of endings, some part of you will resist that understanding as though your life depended on it.
First there is an ending, then a beginning, and an important empty or fallow time in between.
But endings make us fearful. They break our connection with the setting in which we have come to know ourselves, and they awaken old memories of hurt and shame.
“I’ve never felt this way before,” the man said at the end of the evening, “but I feel as though my whole life was built on a frozen lake. We all go on with our activities. We work on the house and play golf and entertain and have our fights. I put in long hours at work and think I’m doing well. Then every once in a while I think, ‘This is ice I’m standing on, and it’s melting’—or ‘Was that a crack I heard just then?’
Within organizations, you may begin to notice a widening gap between you at forty and the younger employees. It is as though some unmarked boundary had been crossed unawares, and you are now in another country. The young and the old seem to have their own places in the structure, but the middle-aged have lost a sense of belonging.
The transitions of life’s afternoon are more mysterious than those of its morning, and so we have tended to pass them off as the effects of physical aging. But something deeper is going on, something as purposive in its own way as the development of social roles and interpersonal relationships in life’s first half. The loss of interest in the accomplishments that motivated your life’s first half is matched by a growth of interest in psychological and spiritual matters.
Like most of us, Odysseus is a slow learner—or unlearner, for it turns out that his most difficult tasks are those of unlearning much that brought him to life’s middle years and to the height of his renown.
So in the end, the homeward journey of life’s second half demands three things: First, that we unlearn the style of mastering the world that we used to take us through the first half of life; second, that we resist our own longings to abandon the developmental journey and refuse the invitations to stay forever at some attractive stopping place; and third, that we recognize that it will take real effort to regain the inner “home.”
Nonetheless, there are developmental issues that we all deal with at some point along the way. The sphinx’s riddle suggests the two most important ones—the first being the transition by which a dependent creature moves into a separate independence and develops a self-image and a personal style. And then later, the same self-image and personal style hinder growth, and the person must face the long, slow process of growing beyond them. Much of this later growth may look at first like loss, just as much of the earlier growth appears to be gain. But that is no more true than the sense that spring
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People change and forget to tell each other. —LILLIAN HELLMAN, Toys in the Attic
Are we so reactionary as creatures that we do not change unless someone else forces us to? Are we like pool balls, sitting forever in a fixed pattern until an interpersonal cue ball blasts us into motion? I think not, although we do suffer a kind of inner inertia when circumstances precipitate a transition. But it is not as mechanical as the table full of pool balls. Rather, we are more like stories that are slowly unfolding according to our own preestablished inner themes and plots. Each person’s life is a story that is telling itself in the living of it, and each requires others to play
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Explore the other side of the change. Some changes are chosen and some are not, and each kind of transition has its own difficulties. If you have not chosen your change, there are a dozen reasons to refuse to see its possible benefits—for by seeing such benefits you may undercut your anger with the “adversary” who forced the change on you, or you may realize that the old situation wasn’t all that you thought it was. On the other hand, if you have chosen your change, there are just as many reasons not to want to consider its cost—for that may weaken your resolve or make you aware of the pain
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Whoever in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a [person’s] life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires. —WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
To become something else, you have to stop being what you are now; to start doing things a new way, you have to end the way you are doing them now; and to develop a new attitude or outlook, you have to let go of the old one you have now. Even though it sounds backwards, endings always come first.
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.
transition seems to have a timing of its own and a way of resisting efforts to rush it.
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?
What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. —T. S. ELIOT “Little Gidding,” from Four Quartets1
One of the advantages of being familiar with passage rituals is that they make it clear that the ending involves a symbolic death. When the new mother in the seminar shouted, “I am falling apart!” she was telling the truth—the “she” that she had hitherto identified with was disintegrating. Because of her view that disintegration meant malfunction, she assumed that what she needed was a way to repair her life; but she quickly came to see that no mere fixing up of things would suffice. All that good advice she kept asking for was beside the point, for her real need then was to find out how to
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When you discover the fatal love letter or get the news that you’ve been fired, it’s pointless to talk about old realities and new ones. But later, it is important to reflect on these things, for with realities as with identities and connections, the old must be cleared away before the new can grow. The mind is a vessel that must be emptied if new wine is to be put in.
Our endings, we must discover, are often brought about by the very acts and words that we believed would keep things the way they have always been.
The transition itself begins with letting go of something that you have believed or assumed, some way you’ve always been or seen yourself, some outlook on the world or attitude toward others.
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.
(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.)
“It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying, ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say, Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else—but, oh dear!” cried Alice with a sudden burst of tears, “I do wish they would put their heads down! I am so very tired of being all alone here!”
He has half the deed done, who has Made a beginning. —HORACE Epistles1
How do I know (I always wonder) when the ending is complete and when I’ve been in the neutral zone long enough? How do I know which path before me represents a genuinely new beginning or which footprints represent a real path—or even which marks in the dust represent real footprints? It’s all very well to talk about new phases of life, but they’re not different colors, the way the states were on our grammar school maps. There are times when I long for a simple way out, a procedure to follow rather than a process to understand.
Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON 1
