Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

For many people, the experience of the neutral zone is essentially one of emptiness in which the old reality looks transparent and nothing feels solid anymore.

The first of the neutral-zone activities or functions is surrender: one must give in to the emptiness and stop struggling to escape it.

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.

But it is only by returning for a time to the formlessness of the primal energy that renewal can take place. 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.

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.

What you want to capture is a day or a week of your experience: What was really going on, or even what was “trying to happen”? What was your mood? What were you thinking about, perhaps without realizing it, at the time? What puzzling or unusual things happened? What decisions do you wish you could have made? What dreams do you remember having?

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those in inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.”6 We need to translate the hieroglyphic and in so doing to make sense out of what we are experiencing.

the neutral zone’s gift to you is a ringside seat where you can watch your own mind making up realities. Once you’ve had that experience, you will find it harder to take yourself and your sufferings quite so seriously ever again.

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

What you call your past is a tiny portion of your actual living, a selection of situations and events that is supposed to account for the present. One of George Orwell’s slogans in 1984 was “Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future.”7 Beneath his cynicism (history was always being self-consciously revised in that world, you remember), Orwell is accurately noting that it is the present situation that makes a given past make sense—and that a given past suggests a particular future. Even when we set out to change the present, the past defines the possibilities and the limits of the change.

Thus it is important in times of transition to reflect on the past for several reasons—not least of which is that, from the perspective of a new present, the past is likely to look different. For the past isn’t like a landscape or a vase of flowers that is just there. It is more like the raw material awaiting a builder.

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…”

Remember, you don’t have to do anything about the wanting; you just need be aware of it. It’s overkill to control your behavior by denying that you’re attracted to or interested in something.

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

Because endings are dyings in one sense, the obituary is an appropriate statement about your past. As you stand here in the emptiness of the neutral zone, what do you think and feel about the past? What was unlived in that past—what dreams, what convictions, what talents, what ideas, what qualities in you went unrealized? You are at a turning point now. 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.

Importante

The place should be an unfamiliar one and free of the ordinary influences from your daily situation, as was the initiate’s journey of old. The simpler and quieter the setting, the more chance you will have to attend to your inner business. Your food should be simple, and your meals should be small. Leave at home the wonderful novel you’ve been meaning to read, and don’t distract yourself with other entertainment. Take along a notebook to jot in, but don’t feel that you have to write anything substantial while you are there.

Dying, the neutral zone, and rebirth are not ideas that we bring to life; they are phenomena that we find in life. The only trick is to see them by looking beyond the reflected light of the familiar surface of things and seeing what is really there working in the depths.

Again, a subtle inner ending takes place, although everything goes on as before on the outside. The neutral zone overlaps with the old life, and you move like a sleepwalker through a role that you once identified with.