Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

Do what you do attentively rather than distractedly while you wait for the real experience to come along. Making tea and putting on your shoes and watching a bird on the bush outside the window are...

enter as fully as you can into whatever process is taking place.

life, you don’t have to produce results or accomplish anything.

Whatever you are feeling is you, and you’re there to be alone with that very person.

a life transition is a kind of buried rite of passage

The old job or the old relationship is intact. But the person is not there. He or she has become emotionally unplugged. Sometimes this happens because a decision has been made inwardly to end the situation. Emotionally, an ending has already taken place, although the outer circumstances remain unchanged.

it is in the neutral zone that the real work of transformation takes place.

As Arnold Toynbee pointed out, it is into some rabbit hole or cave or forest wilderness that creative individuals have always withdrawn on the eve of their rebirth. “The pattern of withdrawal and return,” he called it,

He has half the deed done, who has Made a beginning. —Horace, Epistles1

fallow

intimation

Because the signal is very subtle, it is difficult to perceive when other stimuli are strong—and that is why we naturally, if unconsciously, seek emptiness and quietness in times of life transition.

the things I like best in your writing come from your own experience.” The remark was one of those reactions that one might easily forget, but this man could not forget it. “It nagged away at me,” he said, “as though it were the answer to all my confusion—although it took me a year to see what the answer really meant.”

“Don’t be something; do something.”

rut,

“The guard is a prisoner too,

“You be this way, and I’ll be that way” doesn’t work any more, because now I want to be that way and you… well, you will have to do some changing, too. A situation such as this must be dealt with openly and honestly, for indirection and denial only increase the other’s resistance.

When the time comes, stop getting ready to do it—and do it!

shift your purpose from the goal to the process of reaching the goal.

This advice is not simply a way of checking your disappointment when your progress is slow. It also represents the real mechanics of the transition process—

It is, after all, a new chapter of my life that is beginning. I haven’t become somebody else.

The neutral zone is meant to be only a temporary state. It is, as they say, a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. When the neutral zone has done its work, you come back.

Zen saying

“After enlightenment, the laundry.”

The societies that were most knowledgeable about it and designed rituals to facilitate it had, however, little faith in descriptions.

Literal statements do not reach deep enough in the mind to have a lasting effect. For that reason, these societies couched their most important insights in the form of stories.

Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. —Ralph Waldo Emerson1

crag

In stories one does not ask why, for everything goes according to a plan that is patterned on life itself.

in the world of myth everything happens for a reason and points toward some further end.

succor.

Alas, I am faced with an ending. I can’t take everything with me on this particular journey. I must decide what to let go of, for now, and what to bring forward.

true essence of life lies in transition, where hope and creativity, insight and possibility reside. Transition is at the heart of revitalization and transformation.

Renewal occurs whenever we relinquish something we were attached to and follow life’s invitation toward new energy and a fresh purpose.

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