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

We place a high value on monetary success and professional prestige, and that encourages people to set (and then keep trying to reach) distant and elevated goals. This emphasis on success often stands in the way of people doing what really interests them and makes them happy. The elevated and distant goal of success is often rationalized by the ide

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.

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

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

Describe as well as you can what this current transition is—what it feels like, what it is doing to you, what it makes you think or wonder, and what it reminds you of. If the idea appeals to you, try drawing your transition, either as an abstract design or as a representational picture.

Innovation and technological advances in all fields require change and new learning.

Even though it sounds backward, endings always come first. The first task is to let go.

Don’t act for the sake of action.

distressed.