The Process of Transitions

Change is a situational shift.

Getting a new boss is a change, and so is receiving a promotion or losing your job.

Moving to a different house is a change, and so it remodeling your house or losing it in a fire.

Having a new change is a change for everyone in the family—including the new baby, who was pretty well situated before all the change too place.

And, of course, losing a loved one is a change—a huge one.

Transition, on the other hand, is the process of letting go of the way things used to be and then taking hold of the way they subsequently become. In between the letting go and the taking hold again, there is a chaotic but potentially creative “neutral zone” when things aren’t the old way, but aren’t really a new way yet either. This three-phase process—ending, neutral zone, beginning again—is transition.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

The one-sided Cycle

The ancient wisdom from Ecclesiastes that tells us that there is a time for living and dying. East and West have traditionally taken opposite positions in relation to this cycle. Eastern religions have traditionally embraced the letting-go that characterizes the ending aspect of the cycle. Western thought, on the other hand, has tried to get the most out of the other aspect of the cycle—the identifications, the embodiments, the actualizations that are associated with the transition phase of beginning again in a new cycle. This approach makes an ending into a breakdown and even a failure. To be fair, the East has its own one-sidedness too. It identifies with letting go and ending, and all the things that are produced by beginnings are dismissed as illusion. The letting go is no longer a dynamic process but a state of detachment.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Tossing Worries into the Sea

I conducted a religious service on board the SS Lurline on a recent voyage to Honolulu. In the course of my talk, I suggested that people who were carrying worries in their minds might go to the stern of the vessel and imaginatively take each anxious thought out of the mind, drop it overboard, and watch it disappear in the wake of the ship. 

It seems an almost childlike suggestion, but a man came to me later that day and said, “I did as you suggested and am amazed at the relief it has give me. During this voyage, he said, “every  evening at sunset I am going to drop all my worries overboard until I develop the psychology of casting them entirely out of my consciousness. Ever day I shall watch them disappear in the great ocean of time. Doesn’t the Bible say something a out ‘forgetting those things that are behind”?” 

Of course, emptying the mind is not enough. It is necessary to refill the emptied mind or the old, unhappy thoughts which you have cast out will come sneaking in again. 

To prevent that happening, immediately start filling your mind with creative and healthy thoughts. Then when the old fears, hates and worries that have haunted you for so long try to edge back in, they will in effect find a sign on the door of your mind reading “occupied.”

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

Renewal Happens

Renewal comes neither by taking a rest nor changing the scenery, nor by adding something new to our lives, but by ending whatever is, and then entering a temporary state of chaos when everything is up for grabs and anything is possible. Then we can come out of what is really a death-and-rebirth process with a new identity, a new sense of purpose, and a new store of life energy.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

A step into authenticity

Transition may not be simply a step toward an outlook that is more appropriate to the life-phase that we are actually in. It can also be a step toward our own more authentic presence in the world. That would mean that we come out of a transition knowing ourselves better and being more willing to express who we really are, whenever we choose to do so. It would also mean that we are more often willing to trust that who-we-really-are is all right—is valid and a person capable of dealing with the world.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition