Transitions Quotes

“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. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won’t work, because it doesn’t “take.”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

“transition always starts with an ending. To become something else, you have to stop being what you are now; to start doing things a new way, you have to end the way you are doing them now; and to develop a new attitude or outlook, you have to let go of the old”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

“You can’t follow the thread of your life very far before you find “the past” changing. Things that you haven’t remembered in years reappear, and things that you’ve always thought were so turn out to be not so at all. If the past isn’t the way you thought it was, then the present isn’t, either. Letting go of that present may make it easier to conceive of a new future.”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

“The real difficulties, in short, come from the transition process. It”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

“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.”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

“Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

“rule number four: first there is an ending, then a beginning, and an important empty or fallow time in between.”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

“slow and gradual that it is hard to see that anything important is happening?”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

“When he was fifty, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most famous American writer of his day, went back for a visit to his hometown of Portland, Maine. While there, he wrote a poem called “Changed”;”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

“There is no right way, for every way has its price and its rewards. The early place finders may later regret that they did not try different options before making long-term commitments, and the experimenters may wonder whether they waited too long and missed some hidden moment when settling down would have felt just right and would have worked.”
― William Bridges, Transitions. Making Sense Of Life's Changes

“But your life lacks a replay button. The transition that brought you to this place cannot be undone. Even putting things back “the way they were” is a misnomer, because back then you hadn’t had the experience of being plunged into transition. And that experience won’t go away.”
― William Bridges, Transitions. Making Sense Of Life's Changes

“Even though we are all likely to view an ending as the conclusion of the situation it terminates, it is also the initiation of a process. We have it backward. Endings are the first, not the last, act of the play.”
― William Bridges, Transitions. Making Sense Of Life's Changes

“The most important fact is not that there are one or three or four or six identifiable periods of crisis in a lifetime; rather, adulthood unfolds its promise in an alternating rhythm of expansion and contraction, change and stability. In human life as in the rest of nature, change accumulates slowly and almost invisibly until it is made manifest in the sudden form of fledging out or thawing or leaf-fall. It is the transition process rather than a thing called “a mid-life transition” that we must understand.”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes

“CONSIDERING THAT WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH ENDINGS all our lives, most of us handle them poorly. This is in part because we misunderstand them and take them either too seriously or not seriously enough. We take them too seriously by confusing them with finality—that’s it, all over, never more, finished! We see them as something without sequel, forgetting that they are the first phase of the transition process and a precondition of self-renewal. At the same time, we fail to take them seriously enough. Because they scare us, we try to avoid them.”
― William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes