Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

by William Bridges

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

If I could offer up a suggestion here, I’ve found that when you’re in the neutral zone, one of the most powerful questions to sit with is, “What do I want?” It’s a deceptively slippery question. Go beyond your first answer. Ask yourself again, “What do I want? And what else? So what do I really want?” When you find an answer that rings deep and clear, you may see possibilities open up, a new beginning appear, a new adventure begin to unfold.

In other words, 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.

Some other societies have paid much more attention to transition than we have, and in doing so they prepared people much more effectively for the experience of being in transition than our society has prepared us. Those societies typically had rituals (we call them “rites of passage”) to help individuals let go of their outlived life-chapter and find a new one to replace it.

To feel as though everything is up in the air, as one so often does during times of personal transition, is endurable if it means something—if it is part of a movement toward a desired end. But if it is not related to some larger and beneficial pattern, it simply becomes distressing.

(Rule number one: when you’re in transition, you find yourself coming back in new ways to old activities.)

I’ve crossed some kind of threshold and there’s no going back. My old life has gone. How come nobody talks about that? They congratulate you on your new life, but I have to mourn the old life alone.”

rule number two: every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one—not just outwardly but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are.

As I said, 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. Like the air we breathe, that mood can be so familiar that it is difficult to identify. But it helps to think back on old endings and to try to recall the feelings and thoughts you had then. As you begin to remember your old reactions to endings, you are likely to realize that your old mindset is being reactivated in the present whenever something ends in your life.

Rule number three: although it is advantageous to understand your own style of endings, some part of you will resist that understanding as though your life depended on it.

You also have your own characteristic way of beginning things, and you can learn something about it by thinking back over your past, starting with early childhood, just as you did with endings.

Sometimes the beginning results from careful and conscious effort, but for most people, important new beginnings have a mysterious and sometimes accidental quality to them. That is interesting because most of us think we ought to take charge of our lives and plan carefully when we’re trying to start again after an ending.

rule number four: first there is an ending, then a beginning, and an important empty or fallow time in between. That is the order of things in nature. Leaf fall, winter, and then the green emerges again from the dry brown wood. Human affairs flow along similar channels, or they would if we were better able to stay in that current.

Events pile up outside us, and we respond inwardly in ways that leave us changed. Not all transitions affect us deeply, of course, but some endings do close entire chapters in our lives, and some beginnings open new ones. It is almost as though we did privately and according to our own schedule what tribal groups once did publicly according to a prescribed timetable: go through the process of passage between one life phase and the next in a pattern of death and rebirth.

According to this view, human development is comparable to mechanical production—it begins when the item is not yet done, and it ends when the item is ready to use. Changes that occur after that point are malfunctions and signs that the mechanism needs repair.

The idea that development (which means “unfolding”) continues uninterruptedly throughout a lifetime is entirely foreign to the world of products. Think how strange it would be to have an automobile mechanic lift the hood of your car and say, “Hey, see that swelling on the side of the cylinder block? That’s your second carburetor beginning to bud.” Machines don’t do that.

We are beginning to understand that this production analogy has led to a serious misunderstanding of our real nature and that we need new ways of thinking about the life cycle.

“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.”

If you’ve realized your dreams, you ask yourself, “Is this it? Is this what I’ve been trying to reach?” And if you’ve failed to realize them (and it tends to be around this time that such discoveries are made), you have to face what the existential psychologist James Bugental called “the nevers”: “I guess that I’m never going to be the head of the firm… never going to have children of my own… never going to be a great writer… never going to be rich… never going to be famous.” For many, this is when they come to terms with the recognition that they have been chasing a carrot on a stick.

Gandhi discovered at fifty his real mission in nonviolent resistance. Cervantes was older than that when he began his career as a novelist.

Yet every transition is an ending that prepares the ground for new growth and new activities.

This shift was common among the middle-aged and older patients of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Describing the typical outlook of such a patient, Jung wrote: 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

Like most of us, Odysseus is a slow learner—or unlearner, for it turns out that his most difficult tasks are those of unlearning much that brought him to life’s middle years and to the height of his renown.

Consider Odysseus’s attempt to sail safely between Scylla and Charybdis, the monster and the whirlpool that have come to stand in the Western imagination for the impossible choices in life. The sorceress Circe explains to him that he can negotiate the narrows only if he does not resist the dangers there. Odysseus demurs, announcing that he is Odysseus and will never turn away from combat. “You rash man,” she replies. “Do the works of war concern you still, and toil? Will you not yield to the immortal gods?” But when he arrives at the narrow place in the journey, he “forgot the hard injunction of Circe, when she ordered me in no way to arm myself. I put on my famous armor, took two long spears in my hands, and went up on the deck of the ship at the prow.” The little man standing on the deck of a fragile vessel, playing the hero when the time for heroism had passed!

Odysseus literally goes through hell on his way home—as most of us do. His visit is made in a different spirit from those underworld journeys taken by younger mythic heroes. His is not an exploit or a test of his manhood, for he journeys into hell humbly and because it is a necessary part of his homecoming.

We all go through hell to learn what we need to learn to complete our life’s journey.

The Odyssey is an important corrective to the view that most of us grew up with: that the years between thirty and sixty form an unbroken plain, and that people do not change significantly from the time they become situated to the time they retire. So, too, are the careers of those individuals who broke the unwritten rule that after forty it is all replay.

But their situations were different. Betty could look forward to a built-in ending in a few years, brought on by the children’s increasing independence and their launch into separate lives. As they grew older, they needed their mother less and less, and Betty’s original desire for a career was renewed.

Having been a stranger to his own real needs and interests for so long, he no longer knew what he wanted or even who he was.

We have a different kind of relationship now, although the transition was fairly rocky for a while. But both of us are happy, and we’re learning new things about ourselves and each other every day. If we’d started over again with new partners, I suspect our new marriages would have ended up being a replay of our old one. But as it is, we’re out on the frontier of our lives, exploring new territory.”

Why is this? Are we so reactionary as creatures that we do not change unless someone else forces us to? Are we like pool balls, sitting forever in a fixed pattern until an interpersonal cue ball blasts us into motion? I think not, although we do suffer a kind of inner inertia when circumstances precipitate a transition. But it is not as mechanical as balls on a pool table. Rather, we are more like stories that slowly unfold according to our own preestablished inner themes and plots.

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. The British historian Arnold Toynbee pointed out that societies gain access to new energies and new directions only after a “time of troubles” initiates a process of disintegration wherein the old order comes apart. He showed how often the new orientation was made clear only after what he called a “withdrawal and return” on the part of individuals or creative minorities within the society.

People who have discounted or blocked out the inner callings from the future have cut themselves off from the very signals that really vital people use to stay on the paths of their own development.

It is no wonder that people who have silenced those inner signals find meaningful careers difficult to launch and to maintain, or that when they encounter times of transition, they are so confused and distressed.

So we’ve got a change-dependent economy and a culture that celebrates creativity and innovation. There is no way that our careers won’t be punctuated by frequent changes, each of which demands a transition from an old way of doing things and an old identity to a new one. And there is no way that these transitions won’t take a significant toll on our productivity as we temporarily siphon off energy and time from performing our jobs to making the transitions.

Don was doing a halfhearted job of teaching. When his principal talked to him about it, Don promised to try harder and left the conference feeling scared and confused. Part of his confusion came from the gradual recognition that it wasn’t just that home issues were undermining him at work; it was that the same issues that were undermining him as a teacher were undermining him as a husband and as a father. In all areas of his life, he felt a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness.

In the process, he discovered one of the important transitions that is likely to take place in a person’s work life sometime after the age of forty: the transition from being motivated by the chance to demonstrate competence to being motivated by the chance to find personal meaning in the work and its results. It is the shift from the question of how to the question of why.

But somewhere along the way—as early as thirty-five for some people, but as late as fifty-five for others—competence begins to lose its force as a source of motivation.

1. What is it time to let go of in my own life right now? This question marks the first difference between change and transition, for the latter must start with letting go.

2. What is standing backstage, in the wings of my life, waiting to make its entrance? The answer is something internal, something subjective, although it may be presented to you as an external event or situation that brings it to your attention.

But whether it is a thought or idea you can’t get out of your mind or an incident that interrupts the ordinary course of your life, this thing is like a message to you, a message that something is standing just outside the door of your everyday awareness, waiting for you to pay attention and invite it in. OK, so what is standing backstage, in the wings of your life, waiting to make its entrance?

Then there are changes to the individual: promotions and transfers, as well as less tangible changes, such as the failure to get an expected promotion or the early retirement of a best friend at work. Each of those changes puts the person into transition, although organizations hardly acknowledge that state and expect people simply to adjust to the changes as they come along.

It is their own developmental task in the closing chapters of their lives to bring back that lesson to the world. It is their business during the final quarter of their lifelong careers—what rubbish that careers end at any point before death!—to help people to understand the great alternating current of life, the rhythm whereby being is followed by letting go, which is followed by emptiness, which is followed by renewed energy and purpose, which is followed again by being.

Although that might involve being in between jobs, that is not the same as being in transition. A transition concludes when something new emerges from your own inner neutral zone, something around which you can build your new life. What emerges is not a new job—which would be a change—but some new sense of yourself, some new reality you’re dealing with, some new idea that is moving you forward.

And remember: you know more than you think you know!

Because we also have great difficulty with life transitions, some people think it logical that we could improve our situation by recreating ritualized transitions. But rites do not transplant well. They are not techniques for doing something but lenses through which to magnify the experience of something. Rituals of passage are simply a way of focusing and making more visible the natural pattern of dying, chaos, and renewal that was believed to operate everywhere in the universe. And without that belief, there is nothing to focus.

We all know how the man feels, and yet endings must be dealt with if we are to move on to whatever comes next in our lives. The new growth cannot take root on ground still covered with the old habits, attitudes, and outlooks because endings are the clearing process.

The old passage rituals are one answer, though they depended on a social reality and a mythic imagination that are rare today. All the same, they provide a way of understanding the natural ending process and provide suggestive parallels to our own unritualized experience. To show how this is so, I will discuss the five aspects of the natural ending experience: disengagement, dismantling, disidentification, disenchantment, and disorientation.

Divorces, deaths, job changes, moves, illnesses, and many lesser events disengage us from the contexts in which we have known ourselves. They break up the old cue system that served to reinforce our roles and to pattern our behavior. It isn’t just that the disappearance of the old system forces us to devise a new one, the way that a breakdown in the economic order might lead to barter. It is rather that as long as a system is working, it is very difficult for a member of it to imagine an alternative way of life and an alternative identity.

One way or another, most people in transition have the experience of no longer being quite sure who they are. This experience corresponds to an important element in most passage ceremonies: the removal of the old identity’s signs and the temporary assumption of a nonidentity, which is represented by shaved heads, painted faces, masks, strange clothing or no clothing at all, or the abandonment of one’s old name.