Transitions: Making Sense Of Life's Changes by William Bridges

Author:William Bridges
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2004-08-10T14:00:00+00:00

THE FINAL CHAPTER

Now that the baby-boomers are passing mid-life, we are seeing an outflow of books about “modern patterns of aging” and “the new retirement.” They all agree that this can be a rich time and that we need not stop working . . . if we don’t want to. But they don’t tell us much about what work naturally means during these years. They say that we may want to volunteer our time and energy rather than doing it for pay. They suggest that this is a time to find what we really want to do—the time of have to is past. They talk about recreation and travel and time spent with grandchildren. They offer advice on diet and travel and health, but they fail to help us create an appropriate final chapter to our work lives. “Retirement,” at least as it has usually been defined, is not that chapter.

In the four-part Hindu scheme of life-long development that we have been drawing upon in this chapter, the final quarter of life is the time of the Sannyasin, the one who emerges from the Forest-Dweller phase of life with a much deeper understanding of life and the self than people have found in earlier phases. Just as the Householder phase represents the fruits of what was learned during the Apprentice phase, so the final chapter of the Sannyasin manifests and offers back to others what was learned during the Forest-Dweller phase.2 What they have learned turns out to have a lot to do with transition because it involves the discovery that whatever you are now is the product of transition. Once your identity was nonexistent, and then it was new and untried. It was only through transition that you let go of whatever you then thought was critical to hold on to, and then you waited a while so that whatever was to come next could emerge and become the new way and the new identity that replaced the old.

You can learn that in the abstract earlier in life, but the only people who know it through living it over and over again are old people. Out there in The Forest, through taking stock of what life has taught them, the people who found a way to do the developmental business of mid-life discovered the deeper, the more spiritual meaning of transition. It is their own developmental task in the closing chapters of their lives to bring back that lesson to the world. It is their business during the final quarter of their life-long careers—what rubbish that careers end at any point before death!—to help people to understand the great alternating current of life, the rhythm whereby being is followed by letting go, which is followed by emptiness, which is followed by renewed energy and purpose, which is followed again by being.

The old need to grow into wholeness, to combine everything (negative as well as positive) into a ripened completeness, is what I described in The Way of Transition as

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