Sometimes life throws you a curveball. Maybe it’s a breakup or divorce, a serious health diagnosis, or job loss.
Whatever it is, life transitions can be painful and hard to navigate.
Bruce Feiler, author of the book “Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age,” explains how to navigate major life transitions at any age. His new book, “A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World — and How It Can Save Us,” is out next month.
“Transitions are this skill that we can and must master,” Feiler said, “given that we are facing so much more change in our lives.”
4 questions with Bruce Feiler
You experienced several crises in your early 40s that spurred your interest in this subject. What happened?
“First, as you may know, I had cancer as a 43-year-old dad of 3-year-old identical twin daughters. I had some financial troubles. And then my dad, who was never depressed a minute in his life, got Parkinson’s and became very depressed, tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. And what happened was, I’ve been a professional storyteller my entire adult life, but this was a story that I couldn’t tell. I was ashamed. I didn’t know how to tell it.
“And when I did, it turns out that everybody has moments when they lose the plot. And we go through three dozen [of] what I call ‘disrupters’ in the course of our lives, that’s once every 12 to 18 months. [It] could be as small as a fender bender or as big as losing your home. But then one in 10 of those becomes, as you say, what I call a ‘lifequake,’ which is this massive burst of change that, you know, leads to pain and confusion, but then ultimately holds the possibility for transition and renewal.”
Can you give us a couple of examples of some major lifequakes and how people dealt with them?
“So, an involuntary lifequake is the one that we might think of: a diagnosis. I talked to people who lost legs, lost homes, lost limbs. So, these are involuntary lifequakes. And about 57% of them are involuntary.
“But 43% of them, interestingly enough, are voluntary. So, you know, I mentioned my daughters. Their birth was joyful. Like I became a parent twice in 32 minutes. But it was a lifequake in every way because it was destabilizing. And so, it’s not just a crisis or a catastrophe. It could be something that you want.
“I started these conversations and these interviews I’ve been collecting back in 2017. And the first couple of years, the first half of the 500, it turns out that 88% of these lifequakes were personal and only 12% were collective.
“But think about what’s happened in the intervening time. We had the pandemic. We had the sort of mini financial crisis that that set off. We know that a lot of people moved during the pandemic. Now we’ve got war. And then what’s coming at us? We are reminded every day, but [artificial intelligence]. And so, I think that the reason that people feel even more acutely anxious and uneasy now is that we still have the regular pace of the personal ones, but we now have more and more collective ones coming at us every hour of every day.”
Will abandoning a rigid plan for our lives make it easier for us to be prepared mentally when lifequakes happen?
“Well, I think that that’s a very perceptive insight, because I think the core problem that we face now is that we have linear expectations but non-linear lives.
“So, what do we mean by linear? Like in the ancient world, you know, they thought life was a cycle. They did not think it was linear. There was no linear time. That idea gets introduced much later.
“This begins to change in the Industrial Revolution, because what’s happening in the 19th century is you have factories, and they have conveyor belts, and they have assembly lines. And all through the 20th century, there were these linear constructs, just like the factory, right? So, [Sigmund] Freud has these psychosexual stages. [Eric] Erikson, the eight stages of moral development, the five stages of grief. All of these are linear.
“And this reaches its peak in the 1970s, when a woman named Gail Sheehy writes a book called ‘Passages.’ Twenty million people read that book. Many people listening to us now are our mothers or grandmothers. And it kind of locks in the idea that everyone does the same thing in their 20s, same thing in their 30s, then has a midlife crisis — and this is how precise it was — 39 and 44 and a half. It’s complete bunk because think of the pandemic. Think of where we are now. You know, if you’re anywhere in this life, of course you’re having it. So, we have to give up the idea that we have this linear progression.”
You say that every life transition has three phases: the long goodbye, the messy middle and the new beginning. Can you talk us through what happens in those phases?
“Look at enough of these, and you see a very clear pattern. They have these phases. And the three phases, as you say, are the long goodbye, where we sort of identify the emotions and mourn the past.
“There’s the messy middle where we shed certain habits and experiment with new lives and new personas and new ways of spending our time.
“And then there’s the new beginning where we unveil our new selves.
“The way, again, that I’ve come to understand this from having all these conversations is everybody has a transition superpower and a transition kryptonite, like you’re good at one of those phases.
“So, pick the phase you’re good at. If you are good at exploring your emotions and marking their rituals, then start at the long goodbye. If you’re good at making to-do lists and, you know, shutting things and turning the page, and I’m going to get back into it and experiment, start at the messy middle.
“Start wherever you’re confident, but remember you can’t avoid the other because if you’re good at making the to-do list, you probably don’t want to confront the sadness or the fear or the shame of accepting the emotions.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Samantha Raphelson produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Michael Scotto produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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