Life Is in the Transitions Quotes

“We’re going through transitions more frequently, but our tool kit for handling them has not changed to keep pace.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“reimagining and reconstructing our personal stories is vital to living a fulfilling life.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“Man’s Search for Meaning”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“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.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“THE AVERAGE PERSON GOES THROUGH ONE DISRUPTOR EVERY 12–18 MONTHS”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“Many disruptors, like adopting a child, say, or starting a new job, would not traditionally be defined as negative, yet they’re still disruptive. Even the most customarily negative life events, like losing a spouse or being fired, sometimes become catalysts for reinvention. Disruptors are simply deviations from daily life.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“You do not have to suffer to learn, but if you don’t learn from suffering . . . then your life becomes truly meaningless.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“forceful burst of change in one’s life that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“plurality of personal-voluntary lifequakes (37 percent) involve work—switching careers, quitting a job, or retiring; 16 percent involve leaving a marriage; the rest of this category are divided”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“More to the point, nonlinearity helps explain why we all feel so overwhelmed all the time. Trained to expect that our lives will unfold in a predictable series of stately life chapters, we’re confused when those chapters come faster and faster, frequently out of order, often one on top of the other. But the reality is: We’re all the clouds floating over the horizon, the swirl of cream in the coffee, the jagged dash of lightning. And we’re not aberrations because of this; we’re just like everything else.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“There is a single, most frequent age at which each period begins,” he went on: seventeen, forty, sixty, and eighty. Everyone lives through the same developmental periods at the same time. Again, the”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“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.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“Life is in the transitions. His point is even more true today: We can’t ignore these central times of life; we can’t wish or will them away. We have to accept them, name them, mark them, share them, and eventually convert them into a new and vital fuel for remaking our life stories. The”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“This leads to my twin warnings: TRANSITIONS ARE COMING. BE PREPARED.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“Lifequakes may be voluntary or involuntary, but navigating the transitions that flow from them can only be voluntary. We must choose to deploy the skills.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“The average person goes through three to five of these massive reorientations in their adult lives; their average duration, my data show, is five years. When you do the math, that means nearly half our lives are spent responding to one of these episodes.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“Instead, life is filled with chaos and complexity, periods of order and disorder, linearity and nonlinearity. In place of steady lines, observers now see loops, spirals, wobbles, fractals, twists, tangles, and turnabouts.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“THE LINEAR LIFE IS DEAD ↓ THE NONLINEAR LIFE INVOLVES MORE LIFE TRANSITIONS ↓ LIFE TRANSITIONS ARE A SKILL WE CAN, AND MUST, MASTER”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“THE LINEAR LIFE IS DEAD ↓ THE NONLINEAR LIFE INVOLVES MORE LIFE TRANSITIONS”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“The world of work is in a sustained period of upheaval. The average worker today holds twelve different jobs before the age of fifty. Those with higher education can expect to change jobs fifteen times and alter their skill set three. The typical job now lasts four years;”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“Brian Wecht was born in New Jersey to an interfaith couple. His father ran an army-navy store and enjoyed going to Vegas to see Elvis and Sinatra. Brian loved school, especially math and science, but also loved jazz saxophone and piano. “A large part of my identity came from being a fat kid who was bullied through most of my childhood,” he said. “I remember just not having many friends.” Brian double majored in math and music and chose graduate school in jazz composition. But when his girlfriend moved to San Diego, he quit and enrolled in a theoretical physics program at UC San Diego. Six months later the relationship failed; six years later he earned a PhD. When he solved a longstanding open problem in string theory (“the exact superconformal R-symmetry of any 4d SCFT”), Brian became an international star and earned fellowships at MIT, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He secured an unimaginable job: a lifetime professorship in particle physics in London. He was set. Except. Brian never lost his interest in music. He met his wife while playing for an improv troupe. He started a comedic band with his friend Dan called Ninja Sex Party. “I was always afraid it was going to bite me in the ass during faculty interviews because I dressed up like a ninja and sang about dicks and boning.” By the time Brian got to London, the band’s videos were viral sensations. He cried on the phone with Dan: Should they try to turn their side gig into a living? Brian and his wife had a daughter by this point. The choice seemed absurd. “You can’t quit,” his physics adviser said. “You’re the only one of my students who got a job.” His wife was supportive but said she couldn’t decide for him. If I take the leap and it fails, he thought, I may be fucking up my entire future for this weird YouTube career. He also thought, If I don’t jump, I’ll look back when I’m seventy and say, “Fuck, I should have tried.” Finally, he decided: “I’d rather live with fear and failure than safety and regret.” Brian and his family moved to Los Angeles. When the band’s next album was released, Ninja Sex Party was featured on Conan, profiled in the Washington Post, and reached the top twenty-five on the Billboard charts. They went on a sold-out tour across the country, including the Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“Feldenkrais Method. His core insight: When we go through periods of turmoil, our bodies share the brunt. To create new selves, we have to create new ways of moving. We have to tweak how we walk, sit, stand, lie, dance, even have sex. We have to rewrite the story not just of our lives, but of our bodies.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“From shame to sadness to fear, from overcoming your resistance to embracing the brutal facts of your situation, the first tool of transitions is to identify the circumstances you’re in and accept the emotions that come with this new state. The next tool may seem even harder to master, yet it’s the one approach people seem to crave more than any other.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“All in, I concluded that the total number of disruptors the average adult faces is between thirty and forty.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says such feelings are our wake-up to a problem “that the body has already begun to solve.” The point is: We may already have entered the transition before our mind even realizes it. Here”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“She became an obsessive runner and an anorexic. For nine years she barely ate. “When you have an inability to connect with people, and you feel shameful about yourself, the only power you have is over your own body. I couldn’t speak up for myself, so this was the only way I could actually exert any influence over myself.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“From this ground zero, a modern meaning movement began to rise, eventually growing to include philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. If the symptoms of meaninglessness were alienation and emptiness, the balm was fulfillment and personal sense-making. The “central concept of human psychology is meaning,” wrote Jerome Bruner. And the central task of every individual is to make your own meaning. There is no single formula. But”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

“But what exactly explained this transformation? To learn more, I plunged into the neuroscience and biochemistry of storytelling; I interviewed experts on the psychological and emotional benefits of life reminiscence; I tracked down pioneers in the nascent disciplines of narrative gerontology, narrative adolescence, and narrative medicine. What I found was a young-but-growing field built around the idea that reimagining and reconstructing our personal stories is vital to living a fulfilling life.”
― Bruce Feiler, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age