Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

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.

How many will you face? Everyone I spoke with, even those in their twenties, had been through one or two; no one over forty had been through fewer than three; some people had been through six or seven. We calculated the average to be between three and five in a lifetime. That sets up an interesting formula: One out of every ten disruptors becomes a

Every now and then—and for many of us more frequently than that—we get hit by a blunter, more explosive force of change. These are the signature events that shape or, more accurately, reshape our lives, often in ways we can’t imagine and with an intensity we can’t control. These are the wolves that upend our fairy tales.

In her book A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong makes the point that every time humans take a step forward, they revise and update their understanding of the world.

Disruptors are a fact of life—and a fact of all decades of life. They adhere to no biological clock, no social clock, and no artificial clock. They toll on their own schedule.

“Please tell me the story of your life in fifteen minutes.”

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.

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.

The second biggest category was personal and voluntary.