Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

Accept your need for this time in the neutral zone. Understand why you are in this situation, why your life seems to be stalled at the very time changes are taking place around you.

The old passage rituals provided the person with this experience of deep aloneness, often in a wilderness setting. (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.)

This retreat is a journey into emptiness and a time to cultivate receptivity.

When Eleanor Roosevelt looked back on her own painful life transition at thirty-five, she wrote, “Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are, and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your own child’s.”

“The guard is a prisoner too, you know.”

The first is the reaction of people who know you well: not whether they approve or disapprove, but whether they see what you propose to do as something new or simply a replay of an old pattern. The second indication comes from the transition process itself: Have you really moved through endings into the neutral zone and found there the beginning you now want to follow, or is this “beginning” a way of avoiding an ending or aborting the neutral-zone experience?

The first, very simply, is to stop getting ready and to act.

Procrastination-planning

The second thing you can do is to begin to identify yourself with the final result of the new beginning.

This is where the third thing to do is important: take things step by step, and resist the siren song that sings about some other route where everything goes smoothly and events are always exciting and meaningful.

Endings and beginnings, emptiness and germination in between: that is the shape of the transition periods in our lives, and these times come far more frequently in adulthood and cut far more deeply into it than most of us imagined they would.

essential to growth