Transitions (40th Anniversary Edition): Making Sense of Life's Changes

transition is a constant and unsettling process that offers, as all great hero’s journeys do, the chance of growth and redemption.

Accept your need for this time in the neutral zone. Understand why you are in this situation, why your life seems to be stalled at the very time changes are taking place around you. Being able to make sense out of your experience at this time is very important, for otherwise the neutral zone can feel like a dead-end road.

picture your ninety-year-old hands. Imagine what your old body will feel like in whatever position you are now in. In your mind, populate the world that the old you will be living in: Who will be there, and who won’t? Where will you be living? How will you spend your days? When you have let your imagination sketch out that world, try going back to

(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.

However, most people use some strategy to “come up with an answer.” If

he calls the years from twenty-two to thirty-three the “novice period” of adulthood.

The transition that brought you to this place cannot be undone. Even

The point is that we need to resist the tendency to imagine that what is needed is external to our situation.

We have it backward. Endings are the first, not the last, act of the play.

It is the transition process rather than a thing called “a midlife transition” that we must understand.