Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

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.