Transitions (40th Anniversary Edition): Making Sense of Life's Changes

By treating ourselves like appliances that can be unplugged and plugged in again at will or cars that stop and start with the twist of a key, we have forgotten the importance of fallow time and winter and rests in music.

The first, very simply, is to stop getting ready and to act. “Getting ready” can turn out to be an endless task, and one of the forms that inner resistance can often take is the attempt to make just a few more (and then more, and again more) preparations.

the world of feather and leaf,

What is it time to let go of in my own life right now?

For “what to do” consists not of ways out but of ways in; that is, it involves ways of amplifying and making more real the essential neutral-zone experience. The way in is the way out, as it happens.

most of us think we ought to take charge of our lives and plan carefully when we’re trying to start again after an ending. As we shall see later, most of us do that prematurely, for our most important beginnings take place in the darkness outside our awareness.

To feel as though everything is up in the air, as one so often does during times of personal transition, is endurable if it means something—if it is part of a movement toward a desired end. But if it is not related to some larger and beneficial pattern, it simply becomes distressing.

The point is that we need to resist the tendency to imagine that what is needed is external to our situation.

transition is a constant and unsettling process that offers, as all great hero’s journeys do, the chance of growth and redemption.