©2017IBKImage

Good Morning,
For awhile now I have been offering insight and encouragement in life’s transitions, through this blog and perhaps it’s been my life’s work for a long time. As I was moving some books from an old to new position this week, I picked up the 25th Anniversary Edition of William Bridges 2004 book: “Transitions …Making Sense of Life’s Changes”. Add 13 years to that and you have a book that has and is still making an impact on people’s lives 38 years later.

The original 1979 book and the teaching in it by Bridges, I now realize was the beginning of my understanding that change and transition are profoundly different The subject of the book in Bridges own words … “is the difficult process of letting go of an old situation, of suffering the confusing nowhere of in-betweenness, and of launching forth again in a new situation. … so (1) an ending, (2) a neutral zone, and (3) a new beginning.” The story of the Exodus at the time of Moses is certainly an example of that. Leaving Egypt; The Wilderness Life; and The New Land.

We often confuse the event – the change – with transition – our reaction and reorientation to the change. We believe that we can quickly go from one event (change) to another without the process of transition, however long or short it may be.

In future blogs I’ll revisit some of what I’ve summarized here, but for now I encourage you to think of some of your own changes and transitions and how they’ve perhaps “grown you” albeit often with hard work and pain.

Today’s image is in the Rhino Neighborhood in downtown Denver, where everything old is now new again and an example of major transition in a city that is one of the fastest “growing” in the country.
IBK