Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age

We’ve talked about the first of those issues—what causes the burst of change and what happens in the wake of the upheaval. But

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

A teacher of students with special needs, Sara had observed that the children she worked with seemed better able to navigate their lives the more they knew about their family’s history.

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

The fact that personal, involuntary lifequakes are by far the most common is a reminder that the nonlinear life is, at its core, not something most people seek out. We prefer to think we control the trajectory of our lives; the reality, unfortunately, is far more tenuous.

Our belief systems may be even more fluid than our identities.

I further divided the list into the five story lines that emerged in my conversations as the shared fabric of personal identity. In order of number of disruptors, the story lines are love, identity, beliefs, work, and body. At 35 percent, love, defined as the larger realm of family and relationships, has the clear plurality of disruptions. All the

“You do not have to suffer to learn, but if you don’t learn from suffering . . . then your life becomes truly meaningless.”