And in the process, he learned the fourth important thing to remember in making a beginning, which is to shift your purpose from the goal to the process of reaching the goal.

(Rule number one: when you’re in transition, you find yourself coming back in new ways to old activities.)

2. Arrange temporary structures. When

the neutral zone’s gift to you is a ringside seat where you can watch your own mind making up realities. Once you’ve had that experience, you will find it harder to take yourself and your sufferings quite so seriously ever again.

Although an answer was slow in taking shape, both of them felt a great sense of relief in having acknowledged that the old way was no longer viable and that they were in transition. Although

Wanting turns out to be a far less clear matter than we usually imagine, for it is overlaid with a lifetime of guilt and ambivalence.

Well, first you’ve got to understand what you’re doing there, and then you’ve got to see why it’s important to stay there for a while—and then we can talk about what to do. For “what

people usually try to put things back the way they used to be. If the transition is significant, however, that attempt isn’t likely to succeed.

Rule number three: although it is advantageous to understand your own style of endings, some part of you will resist that understanding as though your life depended on it.