Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

by Bruce Feiler

“the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstance.”

From work to home, agency is the dominant source of meaning for those who see their lives as following some sort of up-and-down linear shape, an oscillating personal narrative.

The agency people are fierce and determined, and like being in control. They have a clear grasp of their me story.

B Is for Belonging

“The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

Love is the dominant emotion of those who put relationships at the center of their lives. They are the most at peace of the three shapes I encountered. Their we story > their me story.

C Is for Cause

“People questioned, ‘Can you make it? Are you going to be financially okay?’ I never doubted, because there’s a difference between a vocation and a calling. Once I discovered what I was supposed to be doing, I knew nothing could stop me.”

I now see how this helped all three of the ABCs—agency (“I’m doing something!”), belonging (“I’m deepening bonds between my family and my friends”), and cause (“I’m helping my daughters through their pain”).

A century after Viktor Frankl first placed the burden on each of us to determine what gives us meaning, we have more tools than ever to answer that call. We have three primary levers we can tug—agency, belonging, and cause. We have three principal stories we can tell—our me story, we story, and thee story. We have three prevailing life shapes we can choose—lines, circles, and stars.

I call this process shape-shifting, and it’s a powerful way we make meaning in times of personal change.

This feeling of being directionless often happens in the wake of a lifequake.

Viktor Frankl identified confronting one’s mortality as the primary reason we search for meaning.

I’m not suggesting that fearing the end of life has become less potent, but I am suggesting that accepting that life comes with periodic reincarnations is more widespread than we’ve understood.

This suggests that while academics have come to understand that a big part of meaning-making is adjusting our life stories to accommodate a new life reality, that critical part of the process is still not widely known.

“I realized, Holy fuck, I can change the narrative of my life by reframing it.

The occasion of a lifequake is an occasion to reimagine your life story. It is an autobiographical occasion, the second of the major aftershocks.

I use the term shape-shifting to capture this phenomenon, because the heart of the exercise involves rebalancing the relative weight we give each of our three sources of meaning and the shapes that embody them—agency (line), belonging (circle), and cause (star).

Let’s go back for a second to our original definition of a lifequake: a forceful burst of change that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal.

The short answer: by choice. The person going through the experience has to choose to convert the change and upheaval into transition and renewal.

The initial jolt can be voluntary or involuntary, but the transition must be voluntary. You have to make your own meaning.

So what exactly is a transition? Van Gennep said they’re bridges that help connect the different periods of one’s life. William Bridges, the business consultant and author of the influential 1979 bestseller Transitions, said they’re the inner reorientations and redefinitions one goes through in order to incorporate change into one’s life.

My definition: A transition is a vital period of adjustment, creativity, and rebirth that helps one find meaning after a major life disruption.

For some the switch from involuntary disruption to voluntary transitions happens over a matter of months.

“I was coming to life. But I definitely had to flip the switch. I didn’t wait for things to be resolved; I went out and resolved them. Life is not about waiting for the rain to stop; it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

The person going through the transition leaves one world, passes through a hinterland, and then enters a new world.

transitions can be divided into three phases: separation, when you leave the comforts of the old place; margin, when you isolate yourself in the neutral zone; and incorporation, when you rejoin civilized life by entering the new space.

Transitions, Bridges said, begin with endings, continue with the neutral zone, and conclude with the new beginning.

To be fair, the tripartite structure is helpful. There are absolutely different emotional steps involved in a transition that correspond to leaving the past behind, stumbling toward a fresh identity, embracing the new you. My names for these three phases are the long goodbye, the messy middle, and the new beginning. But the reality that came through loud and clear in my conversations is that these steps do not happen in a straight line.

To me, the issue is not how long transitions take, it’s how long we expect them to take. The burden is on us to adjust our expectations.

A transition is an adhesive and a healer.

Research into everything from habits to happiness has found that if you break familiar processes down into their components, you can engage with these components to achieve a better outcome.

They found that in matters of emotion, the body acts before the mind fully identifies what’s happening.

“Fear is good,”

“Fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.”

possible selves.

feared selves.

Fear of the Unknown < Fear of the Known

Write Down

Buckle Down

Face Down

fake it till you make it.

Fear is innate; fearlessness can be learned.

In this way, sadness is almost the opposite of anger. While anger prepares us to fight, sadness prepares us to protect. Anger speeds the world up; sadness slows it down.

“Sometimes bereaved people even say that living with the sadness of loss is like living in slow motion,”

“There seems to be less need to pay attention to the world around us, so we are able to put aside normal, everyday concer...

Resignation

Relationships