Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (1 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes by William Bridges. Copyright 2004 by William Bridges
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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DEDICATION
To all the people in transition that I have worked with during the past 30 years.

PREFACE
http://www.dailylit.com/books/transitions/preface

PART I

THE NEED FOR CHANGE

The nine cities of Troy, each built on the ruins of its predecessor, were accumulated over millennia, from the Stone Age till Roman times. Pompeii was buried by volcanic eruption. . . . The Old World thus had its ghost towns, but more often than not they were buried and men built on the rubble of their ancestors' disappointed hopes. In America the archaeology of fast-moving men on a nearly empty continent was spread plain and thin on the surface. Its peculiar product was the abandoned place (the "ghost town") rather than the buried place. Its characteristic relics were things left by choice before they were used up.

-- DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

The Americans: The National Experience

AMERICANS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IN TRANSITION. Whereas Old World families trace themselves back to a place, New World families originate in an act of migration. Nor did the transition from an old life to a new one end when the immigrants arrived on these shores. From place to place and job to job, Americans kept moving. Drawn forward by the faith that better things lay just beyond the horizon, they lived a life marked by frequent transitions. European visitors often noted this and marveled that Americans seemed to thrive on it. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French student of American life, mentioned the trait in his diary:

Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of
an always moving scene, himself driven by the irresistible
torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time
to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to
change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of
man. He feels the need of it, more, he loves it; for the
instability, instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to
give birth only to miracles all about him.

That, at least, was one half of the American story--the outer, the "official" half. Inwardly, this experience of being in transition was not so comfortable. Like old Rip van Winkle, countless Americans "woke up" to the impact of change on them at some point in their lives. Old Rip, you remember, had been put under a spell, so he had an excuse. But for those who had been seeking transitions as a pathway to self-advancement, the experience was puzzling. When he was fifty, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most famous American writer of his day, went back for a visit to his hometown of Portland, Maine. While there, he wrote a poem called "Changed"; here are the opening stanzas:

From the outskirts of the town,
Where of old the mile-stone stood,
Now a stranger, looking down,
I behold the shadowy crown
Of the dark and haunted wood.

It is changed, or am I changed?
Ah! The oaks are fresh and green,
But the friends with whom I ranged
Through their thickets are estranged
By the years that intervene.

In the century and a half since that poem was written, the pace of change in American life has speeded up greatly. As Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock, "Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it." (That statement, being thirty-five years old, is presumably also out of date!)

But it is not just the pace of change that leaves us disorientated. Many Americans have lost faith that the transitions they are going through are really getting them somewhere. 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.

Moreover, the experience of being in transition is itself changing. Being in between marriages or careers takes on a particularly painful quality when those things are changing profoundly. It is as if we launched out from a riverside dock to cross to a landing on the opposite shore--only to discover in midstream that the landing was no longer there. (And when we looked back at the other shore, we saw that the dock we had left from had broken loose and was heading downstream.) Stuck in transition between situations, relationships, and identities that are also in transition, many Americans are caught in a semipermanent condition of transitionality.

One might imagine that writers and counselors would have addressed themselves to this situation long ago. But that is not so. If you go to the library and look up transition in the subject index, you will probably find that the headings skip from transit systems to translation--nothing on transition. Of course, there are entries under divorce, bereavement, and careers, changing; and a good deal is available on important specific life changes, but nothing on the inner and underlying process of transition itself.

It is true that back during the decade before Transition first appeared, a crop of books on adulthood had been published that at least justified the difficulties we experienced as "Catch-30" or the "Mid-Life Crisis." But such books were based on idealized life schedules that hung off us like one-size-fits-all clothes, so they did little to clarify the actual experience of being in the midst of transition.

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. Drawing on modern research into adult development, I'll give you some useful ways of thinking about why transition occurs when it does. Recognizing that every lifetime has its own unique rhythm, Transitions provides the tools for identifying a personal developmental chronology. Cutting through the particulars of specific changes, the book identifies transition's characteristic impact on work and relationships. Finally, it provides concrete ways for people to help themselves deal constructively with times of transition.

Transitions is not simply a manual on how to cope; rather, it 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, the hibernation begins. With us it is the same. Although the signs are less clear than in the world of feather and leaf, the functions of transition times are the same. They are key times in the natural process of development and self-renewal. Without an understanding of such natural times of transition, we are left impossibly hoping that change will bypass us and let us go on with our lives as before.
If we have learned one thing since Transitions was originally published, it is that change will happen--that change is the norm now, and somehow or other we will need to develop ways of dealing productively with it.

NOTES (please bookmark)
http://www.dailylit.com/books/transitions/notes

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