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

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

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Highlights & Notes

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

Change is your move to a new city or your shift to a new job. It is the birth of your new baby or the death of your father. It is the switch from the old health plan at work to the new one, or the replacement of your manager by a new one, or it is the acquisition that your company just made. In other words, change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate any of those changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture. Unless transition happens, the change won’t work, because it doesn’t take.

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 subject of this book is the difficult process of letting go of an old situation, of suffering the confusing nowhere of in-betweenness, and of launching forth again in a new situation. Because those three phases are going to be so critical to what we are discussing, let me reiterate: all transitions are composed of (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning.

is based on a theory of personal development that views transition as the natural process of disorientation and reorientation marking the turning points in the path of growth. Throughout nature, growth involves periodic accelerations and transformations: things go slowly for a time and nothing seems to happen—until suddenly the eggshell cracks, the branch blossoms, the tadpole’s tail shrinks away, the leaf falls, the bird molts, or the hibernation begins. With us it is the same.

change will happen—that change is the norm now, and somehow or other we will need to develop ways of dealing productively with it.

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.… “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present,” Alice replied rather shyly, “at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.” —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland1

(Rule number one: when you’re in transition, you find yourself coming back in new ways to old activities.)

rule number two: every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one—not just outwardly but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are.

No wonder those tribal rites of passage in which the group facilitates a person’s transition from one life phase to the next often contain rituals for clearing the mind of old memories and information.

Why is letting go so difficult? This is a puzzling question, especially if we have been looking forward to a change. It is frightening to discover that some part of us is still holding on to what we used to be, for it makes us wonder whether the change was a bad idea. Can it be that the old thing was somehow (and in spite of everything we thought we knew) right for us and the new thing wrong?

How can we feel a loss when we marry after years of loneliness or receive an inheritance after struggling to make ends meet or achieve fame after a career spent trying to make it?

We feel these unexpected losses because, to an extent that we seldom realize, we come to identify ourselves with the circumstances of our lives. Who we think we are is partly defined by our roles and relationships, those we like as well as those we don’t. But the bonds go deeper even than that. Our whole way of being—the personal style that makes you recognizably “you” and me “me”—is developed within and adjusted to fit a given life pattern. The very complaining that we do is part of that style.

There are ways of facilitating transitions, and they begin with recognizing that letting go is at best an ambiguous experience. They involve seeing transition in a new light, of understanding the various phases of the transition. They involve developing new skills for negotiating the perilous passage across the “nowhere” that separates the old life situation from the new. But before that can be done, you need to understand your own characteristic ways of coping with endings.

Leaving for a better job may, ironically enough, cause the same grief and confusion that occurred in the past when you reached the sad end of a core relationship. It is important to recognize this, for it means that some of the feelings you experience today have nothing to do with the present ending but are the product, instead, of the resonance set up between situations in your present and those in your past.

What you bring with you to a transitional situation is the style you have developed for dealing with endings.

Looking back over your ending experiences, what can you say about your own style of bringing situations to a close? Is it abrupt and designed to deny the impact of the change, or is it so slow and gradual that it is hard to see that anything important is happening? Do you tend to be active or passive in these terminal situations?

Rule number three: although it is advantageous to understand your own style of endings, some part of you will resist that understanding as though your life depended on it.

Think about how you tend to act at the end of an evening at a friend’s house or a night on the town. Do you try to drag things out by starting new conversations and activities as others seem to be ready to leave, or do you say suddenly that it was a nice evening and dash out? Or what about some recent larger ending, like leaving a job or moving from a neighborhood? Did you say good-bye to everyone, or did you leave a day ahead of schedule just so that you could avoid the farewells?

However you learned to deal with them, endings are the first phase of transition. The second phase is a time of lostness and emptiness before life resumes an intelligible pattern and direction. The third phase is that of beginning anew.

our most important beginnings take place in the darkness outside our awareness. It is, after all, the ending that makes the beginning possible. So we have rule number four: first there is an ending, then a beginning, and an important empty or fallow time in between. That is the order of things in nature.

We expect to be distressed by illness, but it is a shock when recovery leads to difficulty.

What are the events that have brought change into your life in the past year? And what are the areas of your life in which the changes are evident?

Events pile up outside us, and we respond inwardly in ways that leave us changed.

What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening, yet has only one voice? —The riddle of the sphinx The human being. —Oedipus’s solution to the riddle

we think of people as we think of cars: having times of production and function—and then, unfortunately, of falling apart.

In so doing, you can see that the force of life’s two great developmental shifts fan out over the lifetime: the first involves an end to old dependencies and the establishment of the person as a separate social entity; the second involves movement beyond that separateness to something more complex, to a deeper sense of interrelatedness.

The point is that Joanna and I (and quite possibly you) had a memorable transition experience around the end of childhood, and that experience was established in our awareness as a model for subsequent life transitions.

The psychologist Erik Erikson has explained how that process of identity formation works during youth, when a person tries on a series of roles and experiments with different kinds of relationships.1 Daughter, good athlete, average student, girlfriend, actress, sister, babysitter, pal, shy person, closet moralist, dreamer—out of this potpourri of identities some coherent sense of self must be formed. This is the developmental business of youth, says Erikson. He called it the task of this phase of life.

On Your Own: What memories and feelings do you associate with that phrase? You may think of moving into an apartment with several friends and getting your first real job, or you may think of a series of gradual shifts—going away to school (but remaining financially dependent); taking a part-time job (but having to borrow money from your parents for graduate school); and, finally, finishing school and earning enough to settle your debts with your parents. Some people react sadly to thinking about being on their own:

only suggest that even diverse life experiences reflect the same basic transitional task of shifting from the centrifugal force of leaving childhood to the centripetal one of finding a suitable place in the world.

The variety was immense. But beneath the surface, the various transitions began with the discovery that roles and relationships were starting to pinch and bind.

Second thoughts can turn one’s thirties into a difficult time. It is often the first time of transition after leaving home when a person feels real doubt about the future. It can also be a very lonely time, because the very people one would normally talk to about personal problems may be the people one is having second thoughts about. And the distress is deepened by that twisted old idea that if you’d only done things properly, you would have everything settled once and for all by twenty-five or so.

It’s important to recognize the reason for these feelings and to realize that they are natural. Just because things are up in the air now and you sometimes feel as if you were right back where you started, this is not a sign that you have made a mistake or have been wasting your time for the past ten years. It is only a sign that you are in one of life’s natural and periodic times of readjustment and renewed commitment. You are at the end of the novice period of adulthood, a time when long-term commitments are often made. You know the rules now, and you’re beginning to sense what you can and cannot do well. They no longer ask to see your driver’s license when you order a glass of wine. You are, for better or for worse, an undisputed grown-up. The question is, now what are you going to do?

In human life as in the rest of nature, change accumulates slowly and almost invisibly until it is made manifest in the sudden form of fledging out or thawing or leaf fall.

“It’s the mirror that does it to you first, I think,” said Carol on one of the final nights of the seminar. “I still thought of myself as I had been ten years earlier, but one day I looked in the mirror and said, ‘Where’d you come from, old gal? What ever happened to Carol—the girl who used to live here?’” Within organizations, you may begin to notice a widening gap between you at forty and the younger employees. It is as though some unmarked boundary had been crossed unawares, and you are now in another country. The young and the old seem to have their own places in the structure, but the middle-aged have lost a sense of belonging.

Oscar Wilde hits home: “The gods have two ways of dealing harshly with us—the first is to deny us our dreams, and the second is to grant them.”

These discoveries are thought provoking, to say the least, but they sometimes open the door to new activities and new achievements that were impossible when you were under the spell of the old dreams. Carried free of the old conflicts and confusions of trying to make it, and carried out into the clear water of self-knowledge and service, many people find at last what they were meant to do and to be. Gandhi discovered at fifty his real mission in nonviolent resistance. Cervantes was older than that when he began his career as a novelist. Lou Andreas-Salomé was in her sixties when she became a psychoanalyst. And then there is Grandma Moses, not to mention Colonel Sanders.

The transitions during this period depend less often on personal initiative and more often on someone else’s actions, such as your child’s decision to leave home or to marry. As you grow older, the illnesses and deaths among contemporaries carry with them the potential for unforeseen and unwanted transition. Yet every transition is an ending that prepares the ground for new growth and new activities.

Social usefulness is no longer an aim for him, although he does not question its desirability. Fully aware as he is of the social unimportance of his creative activity, he looks upon it as a way of working out his own development.

In the world of Greek heroes, Odysseus has just done a unique thing: he has given up his identity. Identities meant fame, and fame meant power. Great heroes sometimes won combats simply by scaring off their opponents. “I am Heracles… Achilles… the great Theseus.” To say, “I am Nobody,” and to find in that new nonidentity a source of power is significant, and it marks a stage of development going beyond the reliance on roles and the “standing-on-my-own-two-feet” stance that is natural to life’s midday. (It is also no accident that the giant who opposes Odysseus in this initiatory struggle carries the name Polyphemus, meaning “famous” in Greek.) For Odysseus has reached the point in his development where he must begin to turn back on himself those forces he has been directing outward at the world. It is the point at which the hero must stop slaying dragons and begin slaying the dragon slayer.

So in the end, the homeward journey of life’s second half demands three things: first, that we unlearn the style of mastering the world that we used to take us through the first half of life; second, that we resist our own longings to abandon the developmental journey and refuse the invitations to stay forever at some attractive stopping place; and third, that we recognize that it will take real effort to regain the inner “home.”

The transitions in life’s second half offer a special kind of opportunity to break with the social conditioning that has carried us successfully this far and to do something really new and different. It is a season more in tune than the earlier ones with the deeper promptings of the spirit.

  • Importante

Expand this recollection a little. Which of your own life transition points have been the most important so far? We have been discussing a series of typical times of transition and the developmental issues that are critical at each stage. But forget that. What is the chronology of your own experience with transition? Begin with the end of childhood and move up to the present. In some of these transitions, nothing very important changed. But in others, a chapter of your life ended. Make a list of these significant transitions.

but because his father had been miserable from the moment he retired. It is important to identify those transition points that simply correspond to transitions your parents made, since these points represent programming that may have nothing to do with the realities in your own life.

Much of this later growth may look at first like loss, just as much of the earlier growth appears to be gain. But that is no more true than the sense that spring is a season of gain and fall a season of loss. Each is essential to the full cycle, and the cycle is the only context in which the specific changes along the way have real meaning.

It takes a long time to be really married. One marries many times at many levels within a marriage. If you have more marriages than you have divorces within the marriage, you’re lucky and you stick it out. —Ruby Dee1

People change and forget to tell each other. —Lillian Hellman2

As they grew older, they needed their mother less and less, and Betty’s original desire for a career was renewed.

they say they support a change that someone else in the system is trying to make, but under the table they try to sabotage the change.

Well, she is. Relationships are always structured by unspoken agreements, although people are seldom conscious of it. Beginning very early there is a psychological division of labor within a relationship: one person takes care of the practical issues, and the other handles the human ones; or one expresses emotions, and the other anchors the relationship in practical ways; or one is full of plans, and the other is the tough critic. Each of them has always been somewhat that way—roles aren’t invented out of thin air, after all—but the partnership lets them become more so. After a few years of that, the two are polarized with the role-enabled side of each personality artificially amplified by the arrangement. Each of them becomes a less-than-whole person, and each becomes a stand-in for the side of the other’s personality that is not being expressed within the relationship. He’s not just a rational guy. He becomes the substitute for her rationality.

To become a couple is to agree implicitly to play a prearranged part in another person’s story, although it sometimes takes a while to get the part down really well. It isn’t enough to follow the overt signals, for the part might be that of the person who “never does what I ask you to do.”

It is simply the reorganization of the family system whenever an ending point is reached. And the process is greatly facilitated by the recognition that a relationship, like the lives that come together to form it, has its seasons and its times of turning. Problems, in that view, are not malfunctions to be solved or flaws to be corrected; they are the signals that a chapter in the joint story has ended.

You will need to work out ways of going on while the inner work is being done. This may involve working out a temporary way to make decisions; it may involve agreements about how to allocate responsibilities until something more permanent can be devised; or it may simply involve an inner resolve to accept a given situation as temporary and to transfer some energy to finding a replacement for it.

So make your time of transition a time of renewal and transformation. Come out of it stronger and better adapted to your world than you were when you went in.

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a [person’s] life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1

So we’ve got a change-dependent economy and a culture that celebrates creativity and innovation. There is no way that our careers won’t be punctuated by frequent changes, each of which demands a transition from an old way of doing things and an old identity to a new one. And there is no way that these transitions won’t take a significant toll on our productivity as we temporarily siphon off energy and time from performing our jobs to making the transitions. If that temporary displacement of energy happens to only a few individuals, it is their problem; but when it occurs on a large scale, as it does during big reorganizations and mergers, the individual problem of career transition becomes the organization’s problem, in the form of “reduced productivity,” “absenteeism,” “increased defects,” or “turnover.”

Whether at the individual or organization-wide level, transition always reveals the same three phases that we keep returning to. Whether the source of the transition is an external change or your own inner development, the transition always starts with an ending. To become something else, you have to stop being what you are now; to start doing things a new way, you have to end the way you are doing them now; and to develop a new attitude or outlook, you have to let go of the old one you have now. Even though it sounds backward, endings always come first. The first task is to let go.

A person’s career, like the long-term relationships that we discussed in the last chapter, goes through a sequence of phases. To begin a new job is to encounter the same kinds of difficulties that one finds when beginning a new relationship. Each person undergoes a period of adjustment, although “adjustment” is a misleadingly mechanistic concept. It suggests that you need to fiddle with the dials and reset the switches to adapt yourself to the new situation. The trouble with this view is that although difficult changes must be made as one gets used to a new situation, the difficulty comes not from these changes but from the underlying and more difficult process of letting go of the person you used to be and then finding the new person you need to become in the new situation. The real difficulties, in short, come from the transition process.

Part of his confusion came from the gradual recognition that it wasn’t just that home issues were undermining him at work; it was that the same issues that were undermining him as a teacher were undermining him as a husband and as a father. In all areas of his life, he felt a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness.

he discovered one of the important transitions that is likely to take place in a person’s work life sometime after the age of forty: the transition from being motivated by the chance to demonstrate competence to being motivated by the chance to find personal meaning in the work and its results. It is the shift from the question of how to the question of why. The work world knows all about competence. Most evaluations and rewards are determined by a person’s competence. Vocational guidance emphasizes it in testing which areas of work one would be most competent in. Transfers and promotions are based upon competence. In business and the professions, you get in and get ahead by demonstrating your competence. But somewhere along the way—as early as thirty-five for some people, but as late as fifty-five for others—competence begins to lose its force as a source of motivation. The doctor says, “Yes, I’m a good surgeon, but the technical challenges just don’t interest me the way they used to. What’s the point of doing the same things over and over again?” And the plumber and the social worker and the housekeeper say the same thing. Of course, the old flame can be rekindled temporarily by shifting to an area where you must begin all over again and develop new competence, but the effects of such a change are usually short-lived. The season of competence is passing, in spite of some late-flowering transplants.

Your work life, like your relational life, has its own natural rhythm. The task is to find the connection between the change in your work or career and the underlying developmental rhythm of your life.

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

What is standing backstage, in the wings of my life, waiting to make its entrance?

Big transitions are happening at that time, and they are pieces of something even bigger: the end of life’s first season, the time devoted to learning what’s going to be expected of you by the world. As with all large transitions, the success of that time begins with letting go of the world you were used to. As we have already said, traditional societies (and especially tribal ones) provided people with special rituals designed to amplify and dramatize the inner transition that was occurring then.

Those questions come from getting caught up in the content of our situation and from overlooking the underlying pattern. The feelings that we encounter at such a time are best understood as signs of a life passage that has been stripped of its rites and tossed aside as no longer useful. We are so distant from this sense that life has natural chapters, along with introductions marking transition, that we hardly know what we are missing. But life remembers—and tries to remind us.

What they have learned turns out to have a lot to do with transition because it involves the discovery that whatever you are now is the product of transition. Once your identity was nonexistent, and then it was new and untried. It was only through transition that you let go of whatever you thought at the time was critical to hold on to, and then you waited a while so that whatever was to come next could emerge and become the new way and the new identity that replaced the old.

The old need to grow into wholeness, to combine everything (negative as well as positive) into a ripened completeness, is what I described in my book The Way of Transition as the product of having been through transition often enough to understand the tremendous value of living through times when letting go is the only appropriate response to life. Important though perseverance is, old people know how easily it can turn into a refusal to get the message that life is trying to deliver. Being unwilling to accept defeat—though celebrated in the worlds of sports and warfare—is often a guarantee that one will never learn the lessons that must be learned if one is to mature. Elders need to help younger people learn that without releasing the fruits of one season, they cannot blossom into the next.4

The final chapter of the work life may or may not involve salaried work, but it must return to society the fruits of those discoveries made during the third quarter of life.

“The most important fact is not that there are one or three or four or six identifiable periods of crisis in a lifetime; rather, adulthood unfolds its promise in an alternating rhythm of expansion and contraction, change and stability.”

What are the indications that your work life is in transition?

What is the developmental context of this work-life transition?

You may just have misfiled the information when you received it. You put it in the file marked “A Dream I Recently Had,” or “A Crazy Idea I Just Know Wouldn’t Work… But That Fascinates Me,” or “The Books I’ve Found Myself Reading Recently.” In other words, the future is not delivered like the morning paper; the future comes looking like something else. Don’t be fooled. I think that even though you may not have told yourself yet in so many words, you know some very important things about the next chapter of your work life. Tell yourself whatever you know now.

Initiation is so closely linked to the mode of being of human existence that a considerable number of modern man’s acts and gestures continue to repeat initiatory scenarios. Very often the “struggle for life,” the “ordeals” and “difficulties” that stand in the way of a vocation or a career, in some sort reiterate the ordeals of initiation. —Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane1

What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. —T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”1

CONSIDERING that we have to deal with endings all our lives, most of us handle them poorly. This is in part because we misunderstand them and take them either too seriously or not seriously enough. We take them too seriously by confusing them with finality—that’s it, all over, never more, finished! We see them as something without sequel, forgetting that they are the first phase of the transition process and a precondition of self-renewal. At the same time, we fail to take them seriously enough. Because they scare us, we try to avoid them.

It is rather that as long as a system is working, it is very difficult for a member of it to imagine an alternative way of life and an alternative identity. But with disengagement, an inexorable process of change begins. Clarified, channeled, and supported, that change can lead toward a development and renewal.

Anyone who has ever remodeled a house knows a good deal about personal transition because such an undertaking replicates the three-part transition process: It starts by making an ending and destroying what used to be. Then there is the time when it isn’t the old way any more, but not yet the new way, either. Some dismantling is still going on, but so is some new building. It is a very confusing time, and it is a good idea to have made temporary arrangements for dealing with this interim (“neutral zone”) state of affairs—whether it is temporary housing or a time of modified activities and reduced expectations to make the old housing work. And as the contractors always warn you, remodeling always takes more time and money than new construction. Good advice in regard to transition, too.

I told her how I used to be a teacher (the past comes in handy when the present isn’t very clear) and how I was now partly a lecturer and partly a writer, and how I did some counseling and consulting.

“I ain’t what I ought to be,” it read, “and I ain’t what I’m going to be. But I ain’t what I was!”

At other times, though, disidentification is no laughing matter. No longer being Bob’s wife or a salesman, no longer being the old me or a young person is a source of panic. That is when it is important to remember the significance of disidentification and the need to loosen the bonds of the person we think we are so that we can go through a transition toward a new identity.

The mind is a vessel that must be emptied if new wine is to be put in.

first task of transition was unlearning, not learning anew. The lesson of disenchantment begins with the discovery that if you want to change—really to change, and not just to switch positions—you must realize that some significant part of your old reality was in your head, not out there. The flawless parent, the noble leader, the perfect wife, and the utterly trustworthy friend are an inner cast of characters looking for actors to play the parts. One person is on the lookout for someone older and wiser, and another is seeking an admiring follower. And when they find each other, they fit like the interlocking pieces of a puzzle.

without affecting ourselves and others. The point is that disenchantment, whether it is a minor disappointment or a major shock, is the signal that things are moving into transition. At such times, we need to consider whether the old view or belief may not have been an enchantment cast on us in the past to keep us from seeing deeper into ourselves and others than we were then ready to. The whole idea of disenchantment is that reality has many layers, none wrong but each appropriate to a particular phase of intellectual and spiritual development. The disenchantment experience is the signal that the time has come to look below the surface of what has been thought to be a certain way. It is the sign that you are ready to see and understand more now. Lacking that perspective on such experiences, however, we often miss the point and simply become disillusioned. The disenchanted person recognizes the old view as sufficient in its time but insufficient now: “I needed to believe that husbands [or friends or mentors] were always trustworthy; it protected me against some of the contingencies of life.” On the other hand, the disillusioned person simply rejects the embodiment of the earlier view; she finds a new husband, or he gets a new boss, but both leave unchanged the old enchanted view of relationships. The disenchanted person moves on, but the disillusioned person stops and goes through the play again with new actors. Such a person is on a perpetual quest for a real friend, a true mate, and a trustworthy leader. The quest only goes around in circles, and real movement and real development are arrested.

“lost enough to find yourself.”

From home, from work, even from your own mind comes the appeal to continue being the one you’ve been. Don’t change. Do the old, familiar thing again. Just when you feel drawn toward new beginnings, powerful inner and outer forces are blocking the way. The dream is your life.

the situation of the adult who is torn between the developmental thrust that brings about life transitions and the impulse toward repetition that aborts them.

It shows that after a certain point the very ways of being that brought forth and sustained a life phase begin to destroy it.

Our endings, we must discover, are often brought about by the very acts and words that we believed would keep things the way they have always been.

The goal of one phase of life becomes the burden of the next. That is why rites of passage begin with a symbolic death. Without that death, the life becomes “polluted,” as the oracle said the city of Thebes had become.

One of the most important differences between a change and a transition is that changes are driven to reach a goal, but transitions start with letting go of what no longer fits or is adequate to the life stage you are in.

The transition itself begins with letting go of something that you have believed or assumed, some way you’ve always been or seen yourself, some outlook on the world or attitude toward others.

It is the internal things that really hold us to the past, and people who try to deal only with externals are people who walk out of relationships, leave jobs, move across the country, but who don’t end up significantly different from what and who they were before. They are likely to be people who have learned to use change to avoid transition. They storm out of a job (“rotten, no-good boss!”) rather than discover what it is in themselves that keeps finding such bosses to work for. They end another (yet another!) relationship rather than let go of the behaviors, attitudes, assumptions, and images of self or others that keep making relationships turn out this way.

My point is simply that the inner ending is what initiates the transition. You see, change can lead to transition, but transition can also lead to change. People who move to another town and embrace a new way of life are making changes that will put them into transition; that is, change leads to transition. But they may have made that move because they are starting to seek different things from life, because their old habits don’t fit them any more, because inwardly they’ve become new people; that is, transition leads to change.

That fact, in turn, reminds us that time not only reconciles us to loss but also helps us to understand the loss so that we can live through it. It is all the more unfortunate that our change-obsessed and transition-ignorant society keeps us trying to make sense of endings in the context of change rather than in the context of transition. For it is only in the context of the transition process that endings hold personal meaning and open the gate to our own transformation.

Endings begin with something going wrong.

Mircea Eliade, one of the greatest students of these rituals, has written, “In no rite or myth do we find the initiatory death as something final, but always as the condition sine qua non of a transition to another mode of being, a trial indispensable to regeneration; that is, to the beginning of a new life.”5 Even though we are all likely to view an ending as the conclusion of the situation it terminates, it is also—and it is too bad that we don’t have better ways of reminding ourselves of this—the initiation of a process. We have it backward. Endings are the first, not the last, act of the play.

I do my utmost to attain emptiness; I hold firmly to stillness. (XVI) Do that which consists in taking no action; pursue that which is not meddlesome; savour that which has no flavor. (LXIII) —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching1

If we do tell people where we are going, they ask in genuine puzzlement, “What are you going to do there all alone?” We hardly know what to answer, though, for we are heading down a dark pathway in our lives. “I want time to think things over, I guess,” we say a little vaguely. But then it turns out that once we are out there, we don’t really think in any way that produces definite results. Instead, we walk the beaches or the back streets. We sit in the park or the movie theater. We watch the people and the clouds. “I didn’t do much of anything,” we report upon our return. And we feel a little defensive, as though we had failed to deliver on our promise.

The activities of your ordinary life keep you “you” by presenting you with a set of signals that are difficult to respond to in any but the old way. Only in the apparently aimless activity of your time alone can you do the important inner business of self-transformation. But you don’t do it as you do ordinary things, for it is in the walking, watching, making coffee, counting the birds on the phone wire, studying the cracks in the plaster ceiling over the bed, dreaming, and waiting for God knows what to happen that you are carrying on the basic industry of the neutral zone, which is attentive inactivity and ritualized routine.

For many people, the experience of the neutral zone is essentially one of emptiness in which the old reality looks transparent and nothing feels solid anymore.

The first of the neutral-zone activities or functions is surrender: one must give in to the emptiness and stop struggling to escape it.

Although a body can move through space in a circle at a constant speed, the same is not true of biological or social activities. Their energy becomes exhausted, and they have to be regenerated at more or less close intervals. The rites of passage ultimately correspond to this fundamental necessity.

But it is only by returning for a time to the formlessness of the primal energy that renewal can take place. The neutral zone is the only source of the self-renewal that we all seek. We need it, just the way that an apple tree needs the cold of winter.

Accept your need for this time in the neutral zone.

Find a regular time and place to be alone.

Begin a log of neutral-zone experiences.

What you want to capture is a day or a week of your experience: What was really going on, or even what was “trying to happen”? What was your mood? What were you thinking about, perhaps without realizing it, at the time? What puzzling or unusual things happened? What decisions do you wish you could have made? What dreams do you remember having?

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those in inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.”6 We need to translate the hieroglyphic and in so doing to make sense out of what we are experiencing.

the neutral zone’s gift to you is a ringside seat where you can watch your own mind making up realities. Once you’ve had that experience, you will find it harder to take yourself and your sufferings quite so seriously ever again.

Take this pause in the action of your life to write an autobiography.

What you call your past is a tiny portion of your actual living, a selection of situations and events that is supposed to account for the present. One of George Orwell’s slogans in 1984 was “Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future.”7 Beneath his cynicism (history was always being self-consciously revised in that world, you remember), Orwell is accurately noting that it is the present situation that makes a given past make sense—and that a given past suggests a particular future. Even when we set out to change the present, the past defines the possibilities and the limits of the change.

Thus it is important in times of transition to reflect on the past for several reasons—not least of which is that, from the perspective of a new present, the past is likely to look different. For the past isn’t like a landscape or a vase of flowers that is just there. It is more like the raw material awaiting a builder.

Take this opportunity to discover what you really want. What do you want, anyway? When the circumstances of our lives box us in, we usually assume that we know what we want but simply cannot get it. “If only I could…” The refrain is familiar. In times of transition, however, a distressing change often takes place: the limiting circumstances are part of what ends, and we are no longer held back from doing what we want to do. But now the refrain changes: “If only I knew what I really wanted…”

Remember, you don’t have to do anything about the wanting; you just need be aware of it. It’s overkill to control your behavior by denying that you’re attracted to or interested in something.

Think of what would be unlived in your life if it ended today.

Because endings are dyings in one sense, the obituary is an appropriate statement about your past. As you stand here in the emptiness of the neutral zone, what do you think and feel about the past? What was unlived in that past—what dreams, what convictions, what talents, what ideas, what qualities in you went unrealized? You are at a turning point now. The next phase of your life is taking shape. This is an opportunity to do something different with your life, something that expresses you in some significant way. This is a chance to begin a new chapter.

  • Importante

The place should be an unfamiliar one and free of the ordinary influences from your daily situation, as was the initiate’s journey of old. The simpler and quieter the setting, the more chance you will have to attend to your inner business. Your food should be simple, and your meals should be small. Leave at home the wonderful novel you’ve been meaning to read, and don’t distract yourself with other entertainment. Take along a notebook to jot in, but don’t feel that you have to write anything substantial while you are there.

Dying, the neutral zone, and rebirth are not ideas that we bring to life; they are phenomena that we find in life. The only trick is to see them by looking beyond the reflected light of the familiar surface of things and seeing what is really there working in the depths.

Again, a subtle inner ending takes place, although everything goes on as before on the outside. The neutral zone overlaps with the old life, and you move like a sleepwalker through a role that you once identified with.

He has half the deed done, who has Made a beginning. —Horace, Epistles1

IN THIS BOOK, as in the transition process, we come to beginnings only at the end. It is when the endings and the time of fallow neutrality are finished that we can launch ourselves anew, changed and renewed by the deconstruction of the structures and outlooks of the old life phase and the subsequent journey through the neutral zone.

“the beginnings… of all human undertakings are untidy.”2

The lesson in all such experiences is that when we are ready to make a new beginning, we will shortly find an opportunity. The same event could be a real new beginning in one situation and an interesting but unproductive by-way in another. The difference is whether the event is “keyed” or “coded” to that transition point, the way that electronic key cards are set to open a particular hotel room door. When the card code matches, the door opens, and the whole thing happens as if it were scripted. When it doesn’t match, the event is just an event, and you are still in the neutral zone. The neutral zone simply hasn’t finished with you yet.

New beginnings are accessible to everyone, and everyone has trouble with them. Much as we may wish to make a new beginning, some part of us resists doing so, as though we were making the first step toward disaster. Everyone has a slightly different version of these anxieties and confusions, but in one way or another they all arise from the fear that real change destroys the old ways that we have learned to equate to who we are and what we need.

“There’s a tough old immigrant inside me who is scared to death of anything new and who believes that the only way to survive is to do everything the old, slow, safe way.”

One person’s safety involves inactivity, and another’s involves perpetual motion, but either way, a new beginning upsets a long-standing arrangement.

It is important to distinguish between a real new beginning in someone’s life and a simple defensive reaction to an ending. Each may exert strain on a relationship, but the new beginning must be honored. The defensive reaction is simply a new way of perpetuating the old situation and needs to be considered as such.

But there are two signs that are worth looking for before you start. The first is the reaction of people who know you well: not whether they approve or disapprove, but whether they see what you propose to do as something new or simply a replay of an old pattern. The second indication comes from the transition process itself: Have you really moved through endings into the neutral zone and found there the beginning you now want to follow, or is this “beginning” a way of avoiding an ending or aborting the neutral-zone experience?

Yes, until you are really ready, you probably won’t make a real beginning. But that does not mean that your odds are improved by complicated steps taken to get ready. When the time comes, stop getting ready to do it—and do it! The second thing you can do is to begin to identify yourself with the final result of the new beginning. What is it going to feel like when you have actually done whatever it is that you are setting out to do? All right, then, say it’s done. There, you did it. You are the person who does that sort of thing. People look at you now as “the one who did it,” and by seeing yourself through their eyes, you realize what self-confidence is: experiencing yourself as one who can do things like that.

This is where the third thing to do is important: take things step by step, and resist the siren song that sings about some other route where everything goes smoothly and events are always exciting and meaningful. In making a beginning, you can become so invested in the results that whatever you have to do to reach them looks pretty insignificant. Trudging from appointment to appointment, licking stamps, adding columns of figures, making reminder phone calls, and explaining your idea for the hundredth time—these are the trivia from which vital new ventures finally emerge. But by comparison with the goal, they seem hopelessly dull. In an important new beginning, a preoccupation with results can be damaging.

He saw himself as searching and learning rather than as not finding what he was after. And in the process, he learned the fourth important thing to remember in making a beginning, which is to shift your purpose from the goal to the process of reaching the goal.

new beginnings can be things to be resisted just as much as the loss-filled ending and the ambiguous and frustrating neutral zone were.

Endings and beginnings, with emptiness and germination in between. That basic shape is so essential to growth that we must learn to recognize it in our lives.

Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. —Ralph Waldo Emerson1

As always happens, an ending clears the ground for a new beginning. In this story, the person did little—everything just happened. Some transitions are like that. They just happen. But when they happen this way, something is missing. The outer situation has taken shape, but the inner state remains unchanged. The old outlook, the old self-image, the old value system remain intact. Outwardly, the change is complete, but the real transition process has hardly begun.

A talking tower? Refusing to help those in need? A journey to the underworld? What is this all about? Well, most significant transitions—the sort of inner change that Psyche is dealing with—involve a time in hell. You go down before you come up. And most of these journeys must be taken alone. All our habits of caring for others (and seeing ourselves as people who would care for others) become self-defeating. We need to resist the old impulses to take care of others and instead to pay attention during this time to what we are doing and why we are doing it. We are going where we have to go if we are to do the god’s bidding. Having left behind a life that we have outgrown, we must continue the transition process to find our new life.

  • Muy importante

Transition is at the heart of revitalization and transformation. Renewal occurs whenever we relinquish something we were attached to and follow life’s invitation toward new energy and a fresh purpose.

  • Importante

Another kind of transition is developmental. This is more of a natural, inner unfolding over time. Adolescence is a developmental transition, as is midlife, aging, or any profound shift to a new way of experiencing the world. These can occur at any point in life—whenever one comes to a realization that some part of one’s life is no longer satisfying and a realization that there are alternatives to the status quo. Whether or not a developmental transition leads to an actual external change, it leaves people feeling different inside.

Identify one transition in your life right now, and observe where you are in the process. • Clearly define what is ending. • Sort out what parts or aspects you will keep and what you will leave behind. • What do you need to unlearn? • Was this an identity or self-perception? Have you defined yourself in a way that no longer fits?

  • Ejercicio

“There is a time for departure, even when there’s no certain place to go.” —Byron in Tennessee Williams, Camino Real

All uncertainty is fruitful… so long as it’s accompanied by the wish to understand. —Antonio Machado, Juan de Mairena

The old reality is gone, and a new one is not yet viable. Patterns are shifting and may not be clear. It is a time for reflection, to allow fleeting thoughts to come in. Boundaries are released. • Describe a moment in time when you intuitively knew what you needed or wanted to do. How did it feel? What drew you to it? What was inspiring, exciting, or fearful? How did you explore it? • Consider making choices rather than decisions or specific action steps.

  • Ejercicio

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. —Martha Graham in a letter to Agnes DeMille

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