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

In keeping with our mechanistic bias, we have tried to make do with recharging and repair, imagining that renewal comes through fixing something defective or supplying something that is missing. But it is only by returning for a time to the formlessness of the primal energy that renewal can take place.

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

In fact, the neutral zone is a time when the real business of transition takes place. It is a time when an inner reorientation and realignment are occurring, a time when we are making the all-but-imperceptible shift from one season of life to the next.

we have tried to make do with recharging and repair, imagining that renewal comes through fixing something defective or supplying something that is missing. But it is only by returning for a time to the formlessness of the primal energy that renewal can take place. The neutral zone is the only source of the self-renewal that we all seek. We need it

Aiming high also means that the payoff is so far away that your life may not provide you with the steady diet of meaning and gratification that comes from doing work that fits and expresses who you really are.

It is no wonder that people who have silenced those inner signals find meaningful careers difficult to launch and to maintain, or that when they encounter times of transition, they are so confused and

but the real need is for a genuine sort of aloneness in which inner signals can make themselves heard.

I will discuss the five aspects of the natural ending experience: disengagement, dismantling, disidentification, disenchantment, and disorientation.

rule number two: every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one—not just outwardly but inwardly,