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

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COPYRIGHT
Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes by William Bridges. Copyright 2004 by William Bridges
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BEING IN TRANSITION

"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 Wonderland

I BECAME INTERESTED IN THE SUBJECT OF TRANSITION around 1970 when I was going through some difficult inner and outer changes. Although I gave up my teaching career because of those changes, I found myself teaching a seminar called "Being in Transition." (Rule number one: When you're in transition, you find yourself coming back in new ways to old activities.) The twenty-five adults who showed up for that course were in various states of confusion and crisis, and I was a bit at sea myself. I had, after all, left my career and moved my family to the country, where we joined several other families and formed a small community. I had set out to change my lifestyle.

I had imagined, I think, that the seminar would attract mostly other exurbanites and that together we could puzzle out this difficult transition. A few of these new country folk were in the class, but the mix was far richer than that. There were men and women who had recently divorced or separated. There were a couple of newlyweds as well as some people who had remarried, one a twenty-six-year-old man who had suddenly acquired four children. There was a widow and several recently retired men. There was the wife of a retired man (who didn't attend the seminar because his health had worsened a few weeks after his retirement).

There was a woman who had just given birth to her first baby; a man who had just had a heart attack; and even a man who had recently received a big promotion at work. ("What is he doing here?" the others asked resentfully. "He doesn't have problems.") There were three or four women who had just returned to college after years of raising children. There were two people who had just been fired. And there was a young woman who was living on her own for the first time. She was appalled to find that the rest of us, her elders, didn't have our lives in better shape. "It's OK to be messing around when you're twenty-three," she said, "but I plan to get it all together by the time I'm your age." (We all nodded sheepishly and admitted that we had planned it that way, too.)

At first, the seminar members were shy with each other and took refuge in the claim that they did not really have much in common.("You still have your job." "Well, you're luckier. You still have your marriage.") But slowly they began to discover that, under the surface, their situations challenged them to deal with the same basic experience. As we listed them on the board the first night, the three main similarities seemed to be that we had all experienced (1) an ending, followed by (2) a period of confusion and distress, leading to (3) a new beginning, for those who had come that far.

Each person's attitude toward what we began talking about as the three phases of transition differed considerably, of course. Those who had chosen to make the changes that had put them into transition tended to minimize the importance of endings; it was almost as if the act of acknowledging an ending as painful was an admission that the change triggering the transition had been a mistake. On the other hand, those who had gone into transition unwillingly or unwittingly found it very hard to admit that a new beginning and a new phase of their lives might be at hand. They were as invested in seeing no good in their transition as the other group was in denying distress. But they all agreed that the in-between place was strange and confusing. They hoped to get out of it, in favor of either the Good Old Days or the Brave New World, as quickly as possible.

We decided to study these three phases of transition, and I announced that endings would be the topic of the seminar's second session. This dismayed the new mother. "I'm not sending him off to college," she said, "just trying to get used to having him." She was trying to cope with beginnings, not endings. He was, of course, a wonderful little baby (she repeated that several times), but she was having some small problems. How much should she let him cry, she asked her classmates, and how could she persuade her husband to help more?

In seconds, the air was thick with advice and we were drifting away from endings fast. Interestingly, though, our advice was of little use because she had heard it all before--had even read most of it before the baby arrived. This upset her and she grew angry, first with her husband, and then with her mother, who hadn't told her what mothering was really like, and then with the baby, and finally with us for "sitting there and nodding and acting sympathetic, when you don't give a damn if I'm falling apart--and I am falling apart!"

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