The Way of Transition Quotes

“We resist transition not because we can't accept the change, but because we can't accept letting go of that piece of ourselves that we have to give up when and because the situation has changed.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“Some people fight transition all the way and bewail their fate, while others come to recognize that letting go is not defeat—that it may, in fact, be the start of a whole new and rewarding phase of their lives.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“In such cases, however, there is no change to serve as a signal that something important has happened. Because the challenge we face is purely subjective, it is not likely to call forth a plan the way an external change does. So we lack a road map by which we can track our progress. We do not have anything to prepare for or any future to adjust to. We have only the gradual (or sudden) discovery that our lives, as we have been living them, aren't workable or livable as is any longer.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“Whether that kind of transition is gradual or sudden, we find that our old life no longer makes sense or gives us the satisfaction that it used to. In that realization, the emotional connection to our old life is broken.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“Renewal is possible only by going into and through transition, and transition always has at least as much to do with what we let go of as it has with whatever we end up gaining in its place.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“Renewal is much more like going from fall through winter to spring than it is like taking a vacation from school or work or treating ourselves to something special.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“Transition renews us.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“There is also a fifth function that the tribal groups, with their walkabouts and vision quests, would have said was central to the whole rite of passage experience, but which many modern people find it difficult to talk about or even believe in when they encounter. That is the spiritual function of transition. The religious historian Mircea Eliade was speaking of this function when he said that tribal groups believe that passage rituals connected their participants with a timeless state out of which the world emerged—a state that Eliade called The Sacred.1 It is in the neutral zone that we can most readily encounter The Sacred.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“Through reorientation, personal growth, authentication, and creativity, our lives decompose and then recompose around a new theme or idea. Reorientation refers to that process as a turning in the way we go through life. Personal growth refers to the way reorientation brings us into a new and more adequate relationship to the world around us. Authentication refers to the inner face of growth, where the result is not just appropriate but is also some way of being that is truer to who we really are, rather than to a persona or a”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“Reorientation, personal growth, authentication and creativity: What these four things have in common is that they all require that you let go of the way that you have experienced your work and yourself.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“It can also be a step toward our own more authentic presence in the world.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“One thing that the reorientation function doesn't account for is that in reorienting ourselves, we also have the chance—although it is optional whether or not we seize it—to take a step forward in our own development by letting go of a less-than-adequate reality and an out-of-date self-image. So the second function of transition is personal growth.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“This positive-thinking stuff is crap," she said to me one evening as I sat on her hospital bed. "But then, so is negative thinking. They both cover up reality—which is that we just don't know what is going to happen. That's the reality we have to live with. But it is easy to see why people take refuge in optimism or pessimism. They both give you an answer. But the truth is that we just don't know. What a hard truth that is!”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“In the ending, we lose or let go of our old outlook, our old reality, our old attitudes, our old values, our old self-image.2 We may resist this ending for a while. We may try to talk ourselves out of what we are feeling, and when we do give in, we may be swept by feelings of sadness and anger. Why is this happening to me? My friends aren't troubled by such things! •​Next, we find ourselves in the neutral zone between the old and new—yet not really being either the old nor the new. This confusing state is a time when our lives feel as though they have broken apart or gone dead. We get mixed signals, some from our old way of being and some from a way of being that is still unclear to us. Nothing feels solid. Everything is up for grabs. Yet for that very reason, it is a time when we sometimes feel that anything is possible. So the in-between time can be a very creative time too. •​Finally, we take hold of and identify with some new outlook and some new reality, as well as new attitudes and a new self-image. When we have done this, we feel that we are finally starting a new chapter in our lives. No matter how impossible it was to imagine a future earlier, life now feels as though it is back on its track again. We have a new sense of ourselves, a new outlook, and a new sense of purpose and possibility.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“such times, after being more or less the same person for months and years, it occurs to us one day that something has happened inside us. We may try to account for it by chalking it up to some event or blaming it on a change in someone else. But if we are honest with ourselves we can only say that things that used to mean a lot to us don't mean so much anymore, or that something that was once only a shadowy presence in our minds has taken the stage of our attention and demands our attention. We begin to wonder what life would be like if we did thus-and-so. We puzzle over we how we got to this point in our lives, what we really want out of life from this point forward.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“So is the so-called midlife transition, and so is any profound shift to a new way of experiencing the world. Such awakenings can occur at any point in life—whenever one comes to a gradual or a sudden realization that one's career or marriage or lifestyle is no longer satisfying. A developmental transition can even be triggered simply by the recognition that there actually are alternatives to the status quo.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments

“Transition, on the other hand, is the process of letting go of the way things used to be and then taking hold of the way they subsequently become. In between the letting go and the taking hold again, there is a chaotic but potentially creative "neutral zone" when things aren't the old way, but aren't really a new way yet either. This three-phase process—ending, neutral zone, beginning again—is transition.”
― William Bridges, The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments