Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

2. Arrange temporary structures. When I had my house remodeled a few years ago, for several weeks I tolerated a living room wall made of plastic and canvas. That temporary construction was ugly, but it provided me with the protection I needed to go on living in a space that was being transformed. So it is with transitional situations in the world of relationships: You will need to work out ways of going on while the inner work is being done. This may involve working out a temporary way to make decisions; it may involve agreements about how to allocate responsibilities until something more permanent can be devised; or it may simply involve an inner resolve to accept a given situation as temporary and to transfer some energy to finding a replacement for it.

3. Don’t act for the sake of action. The temporary situation is frustrating, so there is likely to be a temptation to “do something—anything.” This reaction is understandable, but it usually leads to more difficulty. The transition process requires not only that we bring a chapter of our lives to conclusion but also that we discover whatever we need to learn for the next step. We need to stay in transition long enough to complete this important process, not to abort it through premature action.

4. Take care of yourself in little ways. This is probably not the time to be trying to live up to your highest self-image, although it is time to keep your agreements carefully. Be sensitive to your own small needs and don’t force change upon yourself as though it were medicine. Find the small continuities that are important when everything else seems to be changing. A friend of mine took her elderly mother to the supermarket the day after she had moved to a new house and a new town. “Peaches, we’ve got to get peaches for your father,” her mother said. It was the wrong time of year and peaches were expensive, but in a situatio...

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 yo...

6. Find someone to talk to. Whether you choose a professional counselor or just a good friend, you will need someone to talk to when you are going through an important transition in your relationships. What you primarily need is not advice, although that may occasionally be useful, but rather the opportunity to put into words your dilemmas and your feelings so that you can fully understand what is going on. Beware of the listener who “knows exactly what you ought to do,” but also be suspicious if you find yourself explaining away you...

7. Think of transition as a process of leaving the status quo, living for a while in a fertile “time-out,” and then coming back with an answer. The British historian Arnold Toynbee pointed out that societies gain access to new energies and new directions only after a “time of troubles” initiates a process of disintegration wherein the old order comes apart. He showed how often the new orientation was made clear only after what he called a “withdrawal and return” on the part of individuals or creative minorities within the society. The needed transformation, it seems, takes place in an in-between state or outside the margin of ordinary life. That is so with individual lives as well: Things end, then you spend a time (or time-out) in the neutral zone, and then things begin anew. That is ...

one tusk

It is no wonder that a job, once a perfect fit with your talents and interests, ultimately becomes boring, or a career loses its power to take you where you want to go. Nor is it a surprise that in even the most rewarding and successful work life many people come to points where—often unexpectedly—they find themselves in transition. Sometimes the transition seems to rise up from inside—a wave of boredom directed at things they used to find interesting or a mistrust of things they used to believe in wholeheartedly; at other times, the transition is precipitated by external changes—either in their personal lives or in the organizations where they work. Either way, people usually try to put things back the way they used to be. If the transition is significant, however, that isn’t likely to work. In our culture, there are forces that stand in the way of this normal, cyclical pattern of development. We place a high value on monetary success and professional prestige, and that encourages people to set (and then keep trying to reach) distant and elevated goals. This emphasis on success often stands in the way of people’s doing what really interests them and makes them happy. The elevated and distant goal of success is often rationalized by the idea that, even if the goal is not reached, its height insures that even falling short of it will lead to substantial achievement. For all but a very few, however, “aiming high” in that way guarantees an ultimate day of reckoning (and what ...

one tusk

So we’ve got a change-dependent economy and a culture that celebrates creativity and innovation. There is no way that our careers won’t be punctuated by frequent changes, each of which demands a transition from an old way of doing things and an old identity to a new one. And there is no way that these transitions won’t take a significant toll on our productivity as we temporarily siphon off energy and time from performing our jobs to making the transitions. If that temporary displacement of energy happens to only a few individuals, it is their problem; but when it occurs on a large scale, as it does during big reorganizations and mergers, the individual problem of career transition1 becomes the organization’s problem, in the form of “reduced productivity,” “absenteeism,” “increased defects,” or “turnover.”

The work world knows all about competence. Most evaluations and rewards are determined by a person’s competence. Vocational guidance emphasizes it in testing which areas of work one would be most competent in. Transfers and promotions are based upon competence. In business and the professions, you get in and get ahead by demonstrating your competence. But somewhere along the way—as early as thirty-five for some people, but as late as fifty-five for others—competence begins to lose its force as a source of motivation. The doctor says, “Yes, I’m a good surgeon, but the technical challenges just don’t interest me the way they used to. What’s the point of doing the same things over and over again?” And the plumber and the social worker and the housekeeper say the same thing. Of course, the old flame can be rekindled temporarily by shifting to an area where you must begin all over again and develop new competence, but the effects of such a change are usually short-lived. The season of competence is passing, in spite of some late-flowering transplants. For months Don wrestled with the question of what he really wanted to be doing at this point in his life. But bit by bit, it became clear. Having spent most of his working life with ideas and theory, he longed to do something that involved practical action. He had always enjoyed working with young people, but now he longed for interaction with people his own age—people who wouldn’t (he hoped) roll their eyes when he began ruminati...

one tusk

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. A young parent assumes that “there will always be time” to make up to children for the mistakes he or she has made—but then comes the day when the children have become what they are, and no major revisions are possible. Mid-life adults may still be making the provisional commitments that served them well in their twenties, when it made sense to keep lots of options open. But at fifty, that same kind of provisional commitment costs them the significant relationships and the big-league career opportunities that send you into the second half of life with momentum and meaning. 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, th...

one tusk

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 career all along; we may consider an early retirement, although we probably at the time lack the funds to pull it off. Those questions come from getting caught up in the content of our situation and from overlooking the underlying pattern. The feelings that we encounter at such a time are best understood as signs of a life passage that has been stripped of its rites and tossed aside as no longer useful. We are so distant from this sense that life has natural chapters, along with introductions marking transition, that we hardly know what we are missing. But life remembers . . . and tries to remind us.

one tusk

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.2 What they have learned turns out to have a lot to do with transition because it involves the discovery that whatever you are now is the product of transition. Once your identity was nonexistent, and then it was new and untried. It was only through transition that you let go of whatever you then thought was critical to hold on to, and then you waited a while so that whatever was to come next could emerge and become the new way and the new identity that replaced the old.

rhythm of expansion and contraction, change and stability.” There is no list of stages that can represent this rhythmic pattern of growth. The stages vary from person to person; and even for a particular individual, it is difficult to put into logical terms just what a given phase of the work life is all about. I suspect that it is as much the process of exploring the question as it is an answer you may come up with that holds the benefit for you when your work life is in transition.

“Once there were two monks who were traveling through the countryside during the rainy season. Rounding a bend in the path, they found a muddy stream blocking their way. Beside it stood a lovely woman dressed in flowing robes. ‘Here,’ said one of the monks to the woman. ‘Let me carry you across the water.’ And he picked her up and carried her across. After setting her down on the far bank, he walked in silence with his fellow monk to the abbey on the hill. Later that evening, the other monk said suddenly, ‘I think you made an error when you picked up that woman on our journey today. You know we are not supposed to have anything to do with women, and you held one close to you! You should not have done that.’ ‘How strange,’ remarked the other. ‘I carried her only across the water. You are carrying her still.’”

Erik Erikson reports having seen over a bar in a Western town: “I ain’t what I ought to be,” it read, “and I ain’t what I’m going to be. But I ain’t what I was!”

common enough to suggest that the old consciousness-altering techniques used in rites of passage did not create a different reality but amplified or enhanced the natural tendency to see and understand the world differently in the gap between one life phase and the next.

To deny it is to lose the opportunity it provides for an expanded sense of reality and a deepened sense of purpose.

transformative experiences of the neutral zone.

We don’t know whether we are going crazy or becoming enlightened, and neither prospect is one that we can readily discuss with anyone else.

He could have endured his situation a little better, perhaps, if he had realized that the emptiness he was experiencing was the natural sequel to an inner ending and that the ending and the emptiness were simply the first two phases of a process that would (unless it was somehow aborted) provide him with a new sense of who he was and where he was going. He might have felt a little less alone if he had realized how common his experience was. And he could have faced the future more confidently if he had used some tools with which to clear a pathway through the wilderness.

First, the process of transformation is essentially a death and rebirth process rather than one of mechanical modification.

The second reason for the gap between the old life and the new is that the process of disintegration and reintegration is the source of renewal. As van Gennep noted in his seminal Rites of Passage: Although a body can move through space in a circle at a constant speed, the same is not true of biological or social activities. Their energy becomes exhausted, and they have to be regenerated at more or less close intervals. The rites of passage ultimately correspond to this fundamental necessity.

The neutral zone is the only source of the self-renewal that we all seek. We need it, just the way that an apple tree needs the cold of winter.

The neutral zone provides access to an angle of vision on life that one can get nowhere else. And it is a succession of such views over a lifetime that produces wisdom.

The way in is the way out, as it happens.

Accept your need for this time in the neutral zone.

Find a regular time and place to be alone.

Begin a log of neutral zone experiences.

Take this pause in the action of your life to write an autobiography.

Take this opportunity to discover what you really want. What do you want, anyway? When the circumstances of our lives box us in, we usually assume that we know what we want but simply cannot get it. “If only I could . . .” The refrain is familiar. In times of transition, however, a distressing change often takes place: The limiting circumstances are part of what ends, and we are no longer held back from doing what we want to do. But now the refrain changes: “If only I knew what I really wanted

Think of what would be unlived in your life if it ended today

The next phase of your life is taking shape. This is an opportunity to do something different with your life, something that expresses you in some significant way. This is a chance to begin a new chapter.

This retreat is a journey into emptiness and a time to cultivate receptivity. The more you leave behind, the more room you have to find something new. Do what you do attentively rather than distractedly while you wait for the real experience to come along. Making tea and putting on your shoes and watching a bird on the bush outside the window are the real experiences. Every detail is worth noticing—each is a note in the great symphony of peep-toot-and-boom.

For once in your life, you don’t have to produce results or accomplish anything.

The neutral zone—the time between the old life and the new—is a particularly rich time for such insight.

In fact, the neutral zone is a time when the real business of transition takes place. It is a time when an inner reorientation and realignment are occurring, a time when we are making the all-but-imperceptible shift from one season of life to the next. Although such shifts cannot occur without an ending, and although they cannot bear fruit without a new beginning, it is in the neutral zone that the real work of transformation takes place.

it is into some rabbit hole or cave or forest wilderness that creative individuals have always withdrawn on the eve of their rebirth.