Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected.

Children who scored highest on this test had a greater belief that they could control the world around them. It was the number one predictor of a child’s emotional well-being.

The psychologist Bessel van der Kolk defines agency as “the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstance.” People who exhibit agency have been shown to be happier and healthier, and have a higher quality of life.

Every now and then—and for many of us more frequently than that—we get hit by a blunter, more explosive force of change. These are the signature events that shape or, more accurately, reshape our lives, often in ways we can’t imagine and with an intensity we can’t control. These are the wolves that upend our fairy tales.

A third of us will get cancer, a quarter of us an anxiety disorder, a fifth of us chronic pain. All of these problems worsen with age, and more of us are old.

pileup of two, three, or four—of these disruptors rises to the level of truly disorienting and destabilizing us.

John Bowlby, the British psychologist who explained how children attach to loved ones in stages, extrapolated that we unattach in a reverse process.

Since we face more of these experiences than we expect—and that number is only likely to increase in the coming years, as I’ll explain—mastering the skills necessary to pass through them becomes all the more acute. Lifequakes may be voluntary or involuntary, but navigating the transitions that flow from them can only be voluntary. We must choose to

What everybody said, in one way or the other, was the same thing: My life has been disrupted, my dreams shattered, my confidence punctured.

Yet just going through such an experience is not enough to make it a lifequake. You must assign it meaning it might not otherwise have; you must be aware that a change is happening and accept that it will lead to some kind of transition.