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

Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture.

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

Aiming high also means that the payoff is so far away that your life may not provide you with the steady diet of meaning and gratification that comes from doing work that fits and expresses who you really are.

During your time in the neutral zone, you are receiving signals and cues—if only you could decipher them!—as to what you need to become for the next stage of your work life. And unless you disrupt it by trying to rush through the neutral zone quickly, you are slowly being transformed into the person you need to be to move forward in your life.

In keeping with our mechanistic bias, we have tried to make do with recharging and repair, imagining that renewal comes through fixing something defective or supplying something that is missing. But it is only by returning for a time to the formlessness of the primal energy that renewal can take place.

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

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.

some of our resistance to going into transition comes from our fear of this emptiness. The problem is not that we don’t want to give up a job or a relationship, or that we can’t let go of our identity or our reality. The problem is that before we can find a new something, we must deal with a time of nothingness.

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.