The Challenges of Life’s Transitions

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Maybe you’re going off to college or starting your first adult job. Or, you’re getting married or expecting a baby, or going through a midlife crisis, or getting that big promotion, or retiring after many years of working. Life is full of chapters, a series of stops and starts, and the transition from one chapter to another is never smooth. Because it is so part of the human experience, there is tons of research exploring every nook and cranny of this process.

Research tells us, for example, that “script-consistent” transitions—e.g., graduating from school, getting married—are easier to manage than “script-divergent” ones—e.g., sudden illnesses, divorces, discovering that you’re infertile¹. And that navigating transitions is easier if you have “rounded endings” where you leave feeling you’ve done a good job and not shackled with tons of regret². Finally, the challenge with many transitions is reworking your self-identity and learning the new skills that the new chapter requires³.

Here are some of the major transitions along with their challenges and skills:

Leaving home

You’re on your own, sort of. If you’re going off to college or into an apartment with friends and working a new job, the positive side is that you finally can be your own person, shape your life the way you want, and create a new identity. But the challenge here is learning how to navigate the larger adult world with less support. There are new skills to be learned—paying bills, developing relationships with strangers, performing on a job around others who remind you of your parents but aren’t your parents—and if you’ve been struggling, for example, with AD/HD or social anxiety, these problems come to the fore.

Getting married

While most divorces occur at the seven-year-itch point, the second most dangerous time in an early relationship is the first couple of years. You need to work out routines, navigate your partner’s pet peeves, and find win-win compromises to small and big problems. After the glow of being married wears off, your challenge is finding everyday compatibility.

Having children

You don’t sleep much or at all during those first months or year of having a baby. You need to figure out how to adjust your parenting style for a 3-year-old versus an 8-year-old, and somehow coordinate all this with your partner. This is where your focus can shift away from couplehood to parenting, and your identity shifts to being a caretaker rather than a lover. The danger is that the couple gets lost. The challenge is keeping that couple connection, creating a balance among kids, partner, jobs, and working together as a team on honing your skills as a parent. Again, if the foundation you laid down in those first years is weak, or mental health issues have gone unaddressed, all this becomes more difficult.

Midlife

It’s now or never: You take that job in Chicago and commute back home on the weekends; you start your own company, or change your lifestyle and dedicate yourself to what brings you joy—your art or craft—or realize your relationship is dead. It’s that stage where you no longer worry so much about what others think, but instead focus on what you need to accomplish before your life runs out. You still have time and hopefully energy, but if you waste that time, lack the energy, feel trapped, or are afraid to act, the opportunities are lost. You end with a bagful of regrets.

Retirement

Time to enjoy the fruits of those years of labor. But if your identity was tied to your work or the only glue holding your relationship together was raising children, you’re on shaky ground. You work through your longstanding to-do list for six months, but then what? What are you going to do for the next 20 years? Some resign to a boring life of TV, YouTube, golf once a week; some bust out and get divorced. The challenge is creating that new chapter, finding a sense of purpose, and reinventing yourself, again.

So, how to best navigate this space between chapters? Three suggestions:

1. Expect some sense of loss. Even if you have a “rounded ending” where there is closure and you're satisfied with what you’ve accomplished, there is still a loss, and loss brings grief. Like a phantom limb, the nerve endings of the chapter left behind still fire for some time. Your thoughts drift back to what was, because what will be is still unclear. As you move forward, however, this fades. As the poet Antonio Machado wrote, “Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking.”
2. Expect a learning curve. The new skills are not learned overnight. Whether it’s steering through office politics, negotiating compromises with your partner, changing diapers, or managing money, you’re going to make mistakes—that’s what learning is about. The challenge is to be patient and avoid beating yourself up or giving up. Life is a process of elimination; every mistake made means there’s one less to make. That’s why, while you may have experience at 40, you may have wisdom at 60.
3. Get support. It may be a teacher, coach, or mentor to help you learn the skills. It may be a good friend who is emotionally supportive or boldly honest, who can hold you accountable, or it may be a counselor who can do all three. Marching through life is not a solo trek but a group activity, and often the bigger the group, the better.

The moral of all this is that you will move through these transitions regardless of what you do or don’t do, simply because the river of life will push you along. The question is how to navigate these transitions most effectively. Ultimately, that’s up to you, and that is maybe the biggest challenge of all.

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