Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

by Bruce Feiler

That leads to the final lesson. The poet Robert Graves once wrote of life in the trenches of World War I that “noise never stopped for one moment—ever.” That’s what it feels like to go through a massive personal change. Life becomes noisy, cacophonous, confusing, confounding—and it doesn’t stop.

And these religions all share another idea, too. At various times in our lives, we return to that chaos, we touch back on a state of disorder and confusion. And we do so in order to create ourselves again. As the great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade wrote, “The symbolic return to chaos is indispensable to any new creation.”

So what are the elements? In my conversations, fascinating clues began to appear. A woman who left a strict religious order told me a stranger in a Shake Shack gave her a piece of advice that changed her life; a former alcoholic told me a stranger in a coffee shop gave her a job when no one else would. A cancer survivor described getting a tattoo to mark the end of her treatment; a divorcé described going to a sweat lodge to mark the end of his marriage. Dozens of people told me that in the nadir of their transitions they took up singing or quilting or dancing or cooking. They turned to creativity to help create themselves anew.

Accept It: Identify Your Emotions Mark It: Ritualize the Change Shed It: Give Up Old Mind-Sets Create It: Try New Things Share It: Seek Wisdom from Others Launch It: Unveil Your New Self Tell It: Compose a Fresh Story

But my conversations point to another approach that many find more self-affirming. Instead of turning to a higher power, they turn inward. Even if they didn’t cause the situation they’re in, they assume the burden for making it better. They take agency over their own transition.

Mark then did what many people do in the wake of a lifequake. He drifted, he wandered, he got lost.

Margaret Atwood may have captured the sensation of disorientation better when she observed, “When you’re in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it.”

Sure enough, a similar pattern emerged. Some people gravitate toward a more exploratory approach, akin to a sandbox: They sleep around, experiment with drugs, tinker with their appearance, redecorate. Others adopt a more linear, quest-like path: They join a twelve-step program, go on a pilgrimage, enroll in classes, open a bed-and-breakfast. Others choose a cyclical model: They attend religious services, meditate, garden, journal.

And in a pattern I didn’t see coming, a remarkable number of people described how at this otherwise dreary juncture—at the bottom of their massive life shift—they turn to creativity. And not just creativity in the abstract sense of a fresh approach to a familiar problem, but in the actual sense of creating something new. They start to dance, cook, sing, paint; they write poems, letters, thank-you notes, diary entries; they pick up banjos, tap shoes, juggling balls, garden shears. At the moment of greatest chaos, they respond with creation.

First, creativity thrives on isolation and disconnection. Studies of creativity for two decades have found a consistent pattern: Those facing adversity often suffer from social exclusion, a sense of being ostracized from society, and a feeling of being out of sync or out of touch with those around them. These attitudes, in turn, give these individuals more freedom to take risks, to experiment, to explore means of expression outside the social mainstream. A study of people living with long-term illness who turned to art found that their experience facing hardship sharpened their perceptions, increased their sensitivity, and stoked their desire to address deep issues around life. They craved creative outlets.

“Now, even when I’m anonymous on the phone, people say ma’am, which gives me the undying pleasure of being able to respond with, ‘I think you mean doctor,’ because, really, I’m a pain in the ass.”

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance. If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you’re not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

thought of his answer repeatedly while doing the Life Story Project. I was flabbergasted by the sheer volume of people who told me that out of the blue, in the midst of their life transition, they started to write. Just as the world seemed to be its most volatile and the ground underneath their feet the most fluid, they found a table, a chair, a piece of paper, and a pencil, and started to write themselves back to life.

The act of writing speeds up the act of meaning-making.

Carol Berz overcame her imposter syndrome upon being elected city council member by learning to slap back at the constituents who wrote her obnoxious emails. “People would write me letters that began, You’re a real piece of shit. Usually men. I used to write back, Thank you very much for your note. I respect your opinion. Finally, I decided, screw this. I started writing these fuck-you emails. Don’t you ever threaten me again, and if you do, I’m going to the police. It was part of learning to be myself.”

So it wasn’t exactly a surprise in my conversations when person after person described how during their transitions they sought changes involving their bodies.

Creativity need not be isolating, stuffy, or overly grand. It need not follow any template at all. What people seem to crave from it is what creation has represented in mythology since the dawn of time: a fresh start. It echoes the timeless cycle of creation, followed by destruction, followed by re-creation. In turning to creativity, we tap into the part of us that’s most human: the ability to generate new life.

“This was perfect. My granny always said, ‘A problem shared is a problem halved.’”

Nearly a century later, it’s become second nature that unconditional support, from either someone who’s been in the same shoes or even someone who hasn’t, can be lifesaving. Sometimes we seek out such comfort; other times it falls in our laps. However the connection happens, it’s the preferred type of support of a plurality of people, a third in my study.

I have a game I occasionally play with my daughters. Beginning when they were adolescents, when they would occasionally show me a piece of writing, I would ask, “Would you like me to tell you how great it is, or how you might make it better?” They went through every possible response before finally settling on what would be their pet answer: “Both!”

Perhaps most surprising: You don’t need to know these people well. A Stanford sociologist has identified what he calls the strength of weak ties under which a casual acquaintance often has more impact on your life than people you know. The reason: Your friends are usually too similar to you. The people I spoke with went even further. Sometimes the person who most changed their life was a neighbor, sometimes a stranger, sometimes a person they had never even met.

“There was a quote from Calvin Coolidge that my mother used to say: ‘Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not—nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not—unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not—the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.’”

Steven credits his new self not to Lifton, his father, or even his sister, but to Moon himself. “Being in the Moon cult gave me the grandiose expectations of having a much bigger impact on the world. Prior to that I was going to write poetry and maybe teach at community college. I would have been nervous to get up in front of a class of twelve. But in the cult, I was expected to go onstage and speak extemporaneously in front of a thousand people. “The ironical, weird story of my narrative,” he continued, “is that being in the cult gave me the confidence to help get people out of cults. By going public, I used the new me to free lots of people who were just like the old me.” The shape of his life reflects this growth: It was a cone, opening outward.

It’s possible that something that once brought you joy all of a sudden is empty to you. But

Telling a successful personal story is central to finalizing a life transition, but how exactly do people do this?

As my friend Catherine Burns, the artistic director of the Moth, puts it, “The best stories are vulnerable but not raw; they come from scars not wounds.”

To me, the good stories are the ones where something terrible happened and you did something about it that is positive and life affirming. Now I’m one of those stories.”

“In moments of great horror there’s a loss of identity,” she said. “All it takes are tiny moments of immediacy: a bite of food, an aroma, a hummingbird on the feeder, the smell of fresh cut grass. These micromoments are around us all the time, but we usually ignore them. Once we notice them, our biology follows, and suddenly that hummingbird, or that grass, leads us to a fancy vacation; we’re in a hammock in Tahiti. I found that if we take advantage of these moments, if we give ourselves permission to follow where they lead, our minds will take us to our healing place.”

The first big lesson of the Life Story Project is that our life is a story. It has multiple events, connected over time. It has problems that protagonists attempt to resolve. It has interesting happenings. But on a fundamental level, our life story has no inherent meaning. We must give it meaning. Just as we must give our lives meaning and our stories meaning, we must give our life stories meaning.

In our culture these days, happiness gets all the attention, but meaning is arguably more important. In a landmark study published in 2013, Roy Baumeister and three colleagues found that happiness is fleeting while meaning is enduring; happiness concentrates on the self while meaning concentrates on things larger than the self; happiness focuses on the present while meaning focuses on stitching together the past, present, and future.

guided autobiography.