The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward

by Melinda French Gates

Because the next day is when we begin to make choices, sometimes unconsciously, about how we’ll respond to change, what we’ll carry forward and what we’ll leave behind. The next day is when we start to form the next version of ourselves.

we need the discipline to separate our own needs from our children’s and the wisdom to know when to let go, at least a little.

Here’s the central idea: A good enough parent is one who cares for their child and tends to their needs without expecting perfection of either themselves or their child. In fact, Winnicott and others argue that a good enough parent is actually more effective than a “perfect parent” (whatever that means) because perfectionism has no place in a healthy relationship between parent and child.

When it comes to taking care of your family—some of the most important work you’ll do in this world—I hope you’ll refuse to let perfectionism rob family life of precious joy. Allow yourself, too, to feel the ease of letting go.

Leaving my marriage was one of the hardest and most important things I’ve ever done. And there is, I am sure, a parallel universe where none of this ever happened. Where I never learned to listen to the voice that whispered inside me.

Now, whether I’m talking to young people or other women my age, I often find myself sharing what I’ve learned about how important it is to distill the sound of your own inner voice—to develop the skills to distinguish between the scripts you have been handed by others and the story you are writing for yourself.

What’s more, I never really took the time to think about whether the next goal on my list was still the right goal—or to evaluate whether it was something I even wanted anymore.

Looking back all these decades later, I can’t help but wince a little at what I missed out on during all those years. The girl I see when I page through that binder was driven by a mix of ambition and anxiety. Yes, I got a lot done. But I also missed opportunities to embrace spontaneity, lean into the unexpected, and learn something new about myself and the world.

“Life is indeed full of possibilities,” Dr. Ahn concludes, “and it’s up to you to discover them.” You can’t do that if you’re blinded by your focus on getting to the next item on your list. The more certain we are of what our life should be like, the more limited we are by our imagination.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do for yourself and the people around you is to have the wisdom to know which dreams to let go of in order to make room for something new.

In her book Radical Acceptance, Brach describes the Buddhist concept of the sacred pause, writing, “A pause is a suspension of activity, a time of temporary disengagement when we are no longer moving toward any goal.” These pauses, she says, “can last for an instant, for hours, or for seasons of our life.” What makes them so important, she explains, is that pausing helps us become “absolutely available to the changing stream of life” instead of closing ourselves off to possibility.

After all, transitions are disruptive and disorienting. They lay waste to all our careful planning and force us to question our assumptions, our ambitions, even our very identities. But that, I’ve come to understand, is part of their magic.

The people we used to be deserve for us to remember that they knew so much less, had experienced so much less, and were doing the best they could with what they had.