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.

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

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.

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

After they’ve crossed it, they are living it—or would be, if they weren’t so loathe to leave behind the sheltered waters of “getting ready.”

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.

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.

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.

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