Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

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

Leaves of Grass contains many notable passages, none more so than a trio of lines in section 51: Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)

We can’t get past the wolves. And that’s okay. Because if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. And if there’s one thing I learned: We all need to be the hero of our own story.

These three essential ideas, as powerful as they are, aren’t the only means we use to live with harmony, fulfillment, and joy. They correspond to another set of tools: the three strands of our narrative identity. The first is our me story—the one in which we’re the hero, the doer, the creator; we exercise agency and, in return, feel fulfilled. The

As the great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade wrote, “The symbolic return to chaos is indispensable to any new creation.”

“All family narratives take one of three shapes,” Marshall explained. First is the ascending family narrative: We came from nothing, we worked hard, we made it big. Next, the descending narrative: We used to have it all. Then we lost everything. “The most healthful narrative,” he continued, “is the third one.” It’s called the oscillating family nar

Life is the story you tell yourself. But how you tell that story—are you a hero, victim, lover, warrior, caretaker, believer—matters a great deal. How you adapt that story—how you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your life—matters even more.

A century after Viktor Frankl first placed the burden on each of us to determine what gives us meaning, we have more tools than ever to answer that call. We have three primary levers we can tug—agency, belonging, and cause. We have three principal stories we can tell—our me story, we story, and thee story. We have three prevailing life shapes we ca

CHAPTER 2 Embracing the Nonlinear Life What It Means to Live Life Out of Order A hallmark of our time is that life is not predictable. It does not unfold in passages, stages, phases, or cycles. It is nonlinear—and getting more so every day. It’s also more manageable, more forgiving of missteps, and more open to personalization, if you know how to n