Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

by Bruce Feiler

Life is the story you tell yourself. But how you tell that story—are you a hero, victim, lover, warrior, caretaker, believer—matters a great deal. How you adapt that story—how you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your life—matters even more.

When in turmoil, turn to narrative. The proper response to a setback is a story.

Children who know that lives take all different shapes are much better equipped to face life’s inevitable disruptions.

reimagining and reconstructing our personal stories is vital to living a fulfilling life.

Instead of passing through a series of preordained life stages interrupted by periodic crises on birthdays that end in zero, we experience life as a complex swirl of celebrations, setbacks, triumphs, and rebirths across the full span of our years.

The number of disruptors a person can expect to experience in an adult life is around three dozen. That’s an average of one every twelve to eighteen months.

William James, the father of modern psychology, said it best nearly a century and a half ago, and his wisdom has been sadly forgotten. Life is in the transitions.

if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. And if there’s one thing I learned: We all need to be the hero of our own story. That’s why we need fairy tales. They teach us how to allay our fears, and help us sleep at night. Which is why we keep telling them year after year, bedtime after bedtime. They turn our nightmares into dreams.

We’re all undergoing change all the time. What’s more, we’re wired to do so.

THE AVERAGE PERSON GOES THROUGH ONE DISRUPTOR EVERY 12–18 MONTHS

“The fear of staying was greater than the fear of leaving.”

we identified three key ingredients of a well-balanced life. Let’s call them the ABCs of meaning. The A is agency—autonomy, freedom, creativity, mastery; the belief that you can impact the world around you. The B is belonging—relationships, community, friends, family; the people that surround and nurture you. The C is cause—a calling, a mission, a direction, a purpose; a transcendent commitment beyond yourself that makes your life worthwhile.

the three strands of our narrative identity. The first is our me story—the one in which we’re the hero, the doer, the creator; we exercise agency and, in return, feel fulfilled. The next is our we story—the one in which we’re part of a community, a family, a team; we belong to a group and, in turn, feel needed. The third is our thee story—the one in which we’re serving an ideal, a faith, a cause; we give of ourselves to others and, by extension, feel part of something larger.

An autobiographical occasion is any moment when we are encouraged or obliged to reimagine who we are. It’s a narrative event, when our existing life story is altered or redirected in some way, forcing us to revisit our preexisting identity and modify it for our life going forward.

The life span of a transition is around five years.

As John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, “For all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”

André Gide said, “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

For many people, the worst of times in their lives turn out to be the best of times to excavate a former interest and turn it into a rejuvenating task.

‘A problem shared is a problem halved.’”

We need what philosopher George Herbert Mead called significant others, people who reflect at us the significance of our actions, and, in doing so, help us create meaning from events we’re often too close to see.

The cultural historian Paul John Eakin observes that the modern autobiography seems to have emerged concurrently with the appearance of personal spaces. It took the rise of privacy for us to eliminate privacy in our public personas.

We have a choice in how we tell our life story. We do not write it in permanent ink. There are no points for consistency, or even accuracy. We can change it at any time, for any reason, including one as simple as making ourselves feel better. After all, a primary function of our life story is to allow us to place experiences firmly in the past and take from them something beneficial that will allow us to thrive in the future.

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.

Viktor Frankl’s observation that our need for meaning is greatest when life is harshest. “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.”