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.

While storytelling has drawn significant academic and popular interest in recent years, there’s an aspect of personal storytelling that hasn’t gotten enough attention. What happens when we misplace the plot of our lives? When we get sidetracked by one of the mishaps, foul-ups, or reversals of fortune that appear with uncomfortable frequency these days? What happens when our fairy tales go awry?

What everybody said, in one way or the other, was the same thing: My life has been disrupted, my dreams shattered, my confidence punctured. There’s a gap between the upward, dependable, “every problem can be cured with a pill, an app, or five minutes of meditation” life I was sold, and the unstable, unpredictable, utterly fluid life I’m forced to contend with. The life I’m living is not the life I expected. I’m living life out of order.

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. We manage to get through many of these disruptors with only minor upset to our lives. We adjust, draw on our loved ones, recalibrate our life stories. But every now and then, one—or more commonly a pileup of two, three, or four—of these disruptors rises to the level of truly disorienting and destabilizing us. I call these events lifequakes, because the damage they cause can be devastating, they’re higher on the Richter scale of consequence, and their aftershocks can last for years.

And it taught me this: We all ache. We all hurt, suffer, and yearn. We all wallow in our bad decisions, mourn our losses, obsess over our flawed body parts, our poor choices, and our missed opportunities. We know we would be happier, richer in satisfaction, maybe even literally richer if we didn’t do these things. And yet we can’t help ourselves. We have what appears to be a genetic imperative to retell our story over and over again, sometimes tarrying a little too long on our poorest performances or weakest moments.

We’re all comparing ourselves to an ideal that no longer exists and beating ourselves up for not achieving it.

The good news of living life out of order—of surviving the fifty-two-card-pickup craziness of the deck of disruptors—is that we’re freed from the shackles of expectations, whether they come from our parents, our neighbors, or ourselves. The should train has slowed. Each of us can make our choices and decide what brings us peace. The bad news is that it can be more difficult. Faced with limitless choice, we choose none. We get writer’s block trying to write our own story. The difference between success and failure—between a life of fulfillment and a life of frustration—is how well you manage the challenge of making meaning in your life.

My definition: A lifequake is a forceful burst of change in one’s life that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal.

Lifequakes are massive, messy, and often miserable. They come at inconvenient times that usually make them more inconvenient. They aggregate. But they also do something else: They initiate a period of self-reflection and personal reevaluation. They set in motion a series of reverberations that lead us to revisit our very identity. They force us to ask what we don’t ask often enough: What is it that gives me meaning and how does that influence the story of my life?

primary side effect of all this volatility is unease, a low state of anticipation and dread, a lingering sense of anxiety over whether what’s coming next will be good or bad. How did I end up in this situation? Why am I feeling so unsettled? What do I do now? It’s as if all that turbulence breeds a kind of existential agitation.

The meaning we make from our lives is not static or stable. It fluctuates, it oscillates, and, every now and then, it evaporates. This feeling of being directionless often happens in the wake of a lifequake. I think of these moments as meaning vacuums, when the air is sucked out of our lives and the previous balance of tendencies that give us agency, belonging, and cause is wiped clean. What follows is a series of aftershocks, ripple effects from the initial jolt that often elicit fear and confusion but can be signs of healing. What follows is a period of shape-shifting.

our lack of general discussion about life transitions has left a lot of us unprepared for what they mean. The simple fact is, three-quarters of the hundreds of people I spoke with said their life transition took four years or longer. And many people used these figures apologetically, as if to suggest they were somehow outliers. The opposite is true. Also, once they learned that they were in good company, they felt relieved. 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.

we spend a huge percentage of our lives in transition. If you consider that we go through three to five lifequakes in our adult lives, and each one lasts four, five, six years, or longer, that could be thirty-plus years we spend in a state of change. That’s half a lifetime! To my larger point that we need to make the most of our transitions, this may be the best argument yet. If you view transitions as times to resent and resist, you’re throwing away far more of your years than you realize. Better make the most of these times before they make the least of you.

found that sadness compels us to turn our attention inward, which is exactly what we need in times of grief. We become more reflective and self-protective. We double- and triple-check that we’re doing okay. We focus more on details. 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.

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.

The hundreds of studies on personal projects have shown how central they are to our identity. On average, we pursue up to fifteen projects at a time, everything from get a pilot’s license to hike the Grand Canyon to repair the hole in the wall before Fred gets home. Women tend to want support for their projects; men want independence to finish theirs. We’re more likely to complete these projects if we state them as determinations—clean out the garage—as opposed to aspirations—find time to clean out the garage.

reaching a personal milestone would hardly seem to be a scary thing you need to tame or normalize in some way. But as anyone who’s been through a long medical treatment, served in combat, or dropped out of the world for a while to complete a daunting project knows, fear of reentry is a real and terrifying thing. I remember thinking at the end of my year of chemo, Now what? I’ve done all I can do; I’ve been in this oddly sheltered place, a place where I didn’t have to make many decisions or follow social norms, a place the poet Hakim Bey called a temporary autonomous zone. But now that I’m forced to leave, the prospects of being ordinary again seemed intimidating. I couldn’t go back to who I was, yet I wasn’t yet sure who I wanted to become.

Transitions are filled with tumult and unrest, but they’re also filled with helpful purging and dazzling creativity. In other words, they’re chaos. And as a new generation of scientists has taught us: Chaos is not noise, it’s signal; disorder is not a mistake, it’s a design element. If we view these periods as aberrations, we risk their becoming missed opportunities. If we view them as openings, we just might open up to them.

Every time we tell our life story, we tell it in a slightly different way. It could be the audience we’re telling the story to or the circumstance we’re telling it in. Whatever the reason, we generate the meaning we need in the moment. That act of reinterpretation is fundamentally an act of agency; it gives us a sense of control and confidence at exactly the moment we feel out of control and lacking confidence. Retelling our story accelerates our recovery.