Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

H. L. Mencken

“Every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, plausible—and wrong.”

change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological.

It is not those events but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won’t work, because it doesn’t take.

maieutics. Derived from the Greek word for midwife,

Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French student of American life,

torrent

the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more, he loves it; for the instability, instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.2

Stuck in transition between situations, relationships, and identities that are also in transition, many Americans are caught in a semipermanent condition of transitionality.

“Catch-30” or a midlife crisis.

all transitions are composed of (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning.

molts,

Long-term stability is a dream.

I feel like it isn’t even my own life I’m living.”

to an extent that we seldom realize, we come to identify ourselves with the circumstances of our lives.

Who we think we are is partly defined by our roles and relationships,

There are ways of facilitating transitions, and they begin with recognizing that letting go is at best an ambiguous experience. They involve seeing transition in a new light, of understanding the various phases of the transition. They involve developing new skills for negotiating the perilous passage across the “nowhere” that separates the old life situation from the new.

we all develop our own typical response to ending things. The inner element in that response is a mental state or mood or frame of mind.

endings are the first phase of transition. The second phase is a time of lostness and emptiness before life resumes an intelligible pattern and direction. The third phase is that of beginning anew.

You also have your own characteristic way of beginning things,

volubility

The variety was immense. But beneath the surface, the various transitions began with the discovery that roles and relationships were starting to pinch and bind.

the years from twenty-two to thirty-three the “novice period” of adulthood.

You know the rules now, and you’re beginning to sense what you can and cannot do well.

the melancholy wit of Oscar Wilde hits home: “The gods have two ways of dealing harshly with us—the first is to deny us our dreams, and the second is to grant them.”

Gandhi discovered at fifty his real mission in nonviolent resistance. Cervantes was older than that when he began his career as a novelist. Lou Andreas-Salomé was in her sixties when she became a psychoanalyst. And then there is Grandma Moses, not to mention Colonel Sanders.

Householder stage of life, a time in which self-fulfillment and personal development have involved participating in social roles, family life, and the world of work.

Forest Dweller.

his true adult education, to discover who he is and what life is all about. What is the secret of the “I” with which he has been on such intimate terms all these years, yet which remains a stranger?

As the Hindu name of this life stage suggests, the transition into it is one of turning away from the world’s business and going into the solitude of the forest for a time of reflection and study.

not the same as our retirement because it is a transition into something, not just a transition from something.

“I took an early retirement, although it wasn’t for the leisure as such that I did it. The idea of sitting on the beach or puttering in the garden doesn’t appeal to me much, but I wanted to use the time to… well, think.

Social usefulness is no longer an aim for him, although he does not question its desirability. Fully aware as he is of the social unimportance of his creative activity, he looks upon it as a way of working out his own development.8

The transitions of life’s afternoon are more mysterious than those of its morning, and so we have tended to pass them off as the effects of physical aging. But something deeper is going on, something as purposeful in its own way as the development of social roles and interpersonal relationships in life’s first half. The loss of interest in the accomplishments that motivated your life’s first half is matched by a growth of interest in psychological and spiritual matters.

throughout the tale Odysseus discovers in one way and then another that he has crossed some mysterious line in his life and that everything that once worked for him now works against him.

The sorceress Circe

demurs,

prow.”

In The Iliad, of course, everything had been male, but in The Odyssey it is to women’s wisdom that our hero must turn to find the way.

Odysseus’s journey home is toward his feminine counterpart, Penelope. In symbolic terms, he is coming home to his own feminine side.

in life’s second-half task of “homecoming,” your encounters with masculine or feminine powers are symbolic

Oudeis, which was what Odysseus had called himself when he met the giant, is the Greek word for “nobody.”

Polyphemus, meaning “famous” in Greek.)

blandishment

So in the end, the homeward journey of life’s second half demands three things: first, that we unlearn the style of mastering the world that we used to take us through the first half of life; second, that we resist our own longings to abandon the developmental journey and refuse the invitations to stay forever at some attractive stopping place; and third, that we recognize that it will take real effort to regain the inner “home.”

Joshua Slocum, who set out at fifty-one to sail around the world alone and made it three years later.

The transitions in life’s second half offer a special kind of opportunity to break with the social conditioning that has carried us successfully this far and to do something really new and different. It is a season more in tune than the earlier ones with the deeper promptings of the spirit.

each of us is on a unique journey with a ticket marked “Good for this trip only—no transfers.”

It takes a long time to be really married. One marries many times at many levels within a marriage. If you have more marriages than you have divorces within the marriage, you’re lucky and you stick it out. —Ruby Dee1

People change and forget to tell each other. —Lillian Hellman2