Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

lug

onerous

vicariously,”

The Rock of Gibraltar is crumbling!

Each of us resists transition because a story is a self-coherent world with its own kind of immune system, and alien characters are out of place. (Think of trying to fit Jason Bourne into Hamlet or Hermione Granger into Little House on the Prairie.)

To become a couple is to agree implicitly to play a prearranged part in another person’s story,

But they will have a far harder time finding help with the issue of how to change or how to let each other change within a relationship. This is unfortunate because at stake in such a situation is not only the relationship but also the ongoing, individual growth of each partner.

This process of renegotiation must take place many times during a long-term relationship

It is simply the reorganization of the family system whenever an ending point is reached.

a relationship, like the lives that come together to form it, has its seasons and its times of turning. Problems, in that view, are not malfunctions to be solved or flaws to be corrected; they are the signals that a chapter in the joint story has ended.

But if one of them cannot persuade the other to share this view and to join in this exploration, there is usually little choice but to begin the exploration alone.

More often than not, it turns out that the ending is not some external situation but an attitude or an assumption or a self-image that both partners have held.

Some of the most difficult transitions within a relationship occur when the power center shifts from one side to the other.

arrangements often change as the two people find the old allocation of rights and responsibilities are chafing them.

hold all those possibilities in mind, and use them as lenses through which to view your present situation in various ways. You may find that one lens clarifies things for one of you but offers the other a distorted view.

advice fits everyone, and no advice fits one person all the time.

A checklist for people in a relationship in transition:

1. Take you...

2. Arrange temporary structures.

3. Don’t act for the sake of action.

4. Take care of yourself in little ways.

5. Explore the other side of the change.

6. Find someone to talk to.

7. Think of transition as a process of leaving the status quo, living for a while in a fertile time-out, and then coming back with an answer.

make your time of transition a time of renewal and transformation.

the natural developmental pattern is not for people to keep the same dreams but to relinquish old dreams and generate new ones throughout their lifetimes.

The image for such a life is not an upward-trending diagonal of increasing achievement but a spiral of linked cycles—the completion of each leading to a new cycle of experience and activity based on a new dream.

We place a high value on monetary success and professional prestige, and that encourages people to set (and then keep trying to reach) distant and elevated goals. This emphasis on success often stands in the way of people doing what really interests them and makes them happy.

Aiming high also means that the payoff is so far away that your life may not provide you with the steady diet of meaning and gratification that comes from doing work that fits and expresses who you really are.

To become something else, you have to stop being what you are now; to start doing things a new way, you have to end the way you are doing them now; and to develop a new attitude or outlook, you have to let go of the old one you have now. Even though it sounds backward, endings always come first. The first task is to let go.

doldrums

purgatories.

“emotionally unplugged”

start with two questions that you should learn to ask yourself whenever you are in transition.

What is it time to let go of in my own life right now?

What is standing backstage, in the wings of my life, waiting to make its entrance?

the classical Hindu idea about the four natural seasons of life,

The Time of Apprenticeship

The Shift to Householding

The End of Householding

The Final Chapter

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

The business of life’s last quarter is to teach what was learned in the Forest.

Elders are not supposed to inundate the young with truisms that too often pass for wisdom; they must show the young how to distill wisdom from their own experiences.

Arnold van Gennep, a Dutch anthropologist,

coined the term rites of passage,

his so-called present is a past that he hasn’t yet let go of?

“Once there were two monks who were traveling through the countryside during the rainy season. Rounding a bend in the path, they found a muddy stream blocking their way. Beside it stood a lovely woman dressed in flowing robes. ‘Here,’ said one of the monks to the woman. ‘Let me carry you across the water.’ And he picked her up and carried her across. After setting her down on the far bank, he walked in silence with his fellow monk to the abbey on the hill. Later that evening, the other monk said suddenly, ‘I think you made an error when you picked up that woman on our journey today. You know we are not supposed to have anything to do with women, and you held one close to you! You should not have done that.’ ‘How strange,’ remarked the other. ‘I carried her only across the water. You are carrying her still.’”

endings happen to us in unforeseeable ways that often seem devoid of meaning—much less a positive meaning. Instead, they are simply events that we try to move beyond as quickly as possible.

the five aspects of the natural ending experience: disengagement, dismantling, disidentification, disenchantment, and disorientation.