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As humans, our tendancy is to focus the external changes in our lives, and rarely on what they ask of us inside. In this post I explore the difference between change and transition, why grief and loss are part of every transition, and why the in-between is where so much of our growth quietly happens.

Change is what happens to us. Transition is what happens within us.

I’ve spent three decades working with humans and the systems they gather in, and I’ve come to believe that much of the unsettledness we feel around change lives in the gap between those two sentences. We plan carefully for the first. We barely notice the second.

Perhaps something in your life has changed: a job ending, children leaving home, a separation, a diagnosis, or the death of someone you love. Or perhaps nothing obvious has happened, and you simply feel off, not quite yourself. There can be many reasons for that. But when the feeling follows a change or arrives with a quiet sense that who you’ve been no longer fits, it may be an internal transition asking to be noticed.

We mostly turn away from our life transitions. We ignore them, or we don’t recognise them. We rarely name or acknowledge them, and sometimes we don’t even know they’re happening. We just experience and grapple with the symptoms without understanding the cause.

This isn’t anyone’s fault. Most of us never think beyond the change itself, so the transition it asks of us goes unnoticed. It’s rarely something we consider for ourselves or support each other through. We simply have no map for it.

Transition is part of being human. So are grief and loss. And yet we were never taught how to notice or attend to either. We learn to read and write, to drive a car and to perform CPR. But when life changes, no one shows us how to grieve what we’ve lost, or how to navigate the internal experience of transition. It’s not a failing on our part. We have simply never been taught.

William Bridges, who spent his life studying how people experience change and transition, made the distinction that has shaped my work.

Change is the external event: the diagnosis, the ending, the restructure, the unexpected news. We can be the initiators of change, and we can also be the recipients of change that is desirable and change that is devastating.

Transition is the internal process we go through to integrate it. It’s the messy, disorienting, confusing, discombobulating, non-linear part that is so often brushed over. It throws us into disarray. It can leave us drifting through our days on autopilot with little to hold on to. It challenges our identity. And, well supported, it fuels our evolution and strengthens our resolve.

Change can happen in a moment. Transition takes as long as it takes.

We can let transition simply happen to us. Or we can turn towards it, listen to what it’s asking, and let that guide us forward. That is the work of transition.

From first breath to last (and beyond)

Transition begins before we even take our first breath. Perhaps the first great transition of all is the soul’s journey into physical form. From conception to embryo to human baby, we arrive carrying so much capacity and potential.

Life, by its very nature, is a series of thousands of tiny transitions. Together they map the path of our growth and evolution, all the way to our final transition for this lifetime: the end of life itself, and whatever lies beyond it.

Then there are the macro transitions. Some we consciously choose to enact, like the decision to leave a marriage or walk away from a friendship that no longer serves us. Others are inevitable at various life stages: becoming an adult, becoming a parent, losing a parent, traversing menopause, to name a few. And others are simply thrust upon us.

All of them involve grief and loss, because change always involves loss. Even the changes we choose. Even the ones we celebrate.

A map for messy territory

I said earlier that we have no map for transition. Bridges offers us one. He described transition as moving through three phases:

• The Ending. We let go of the way things were.
• The Neutral Zone. The old is gone, and the new isn’t yet ready.
• The New Beginning. New identity, energy and purpose begin to emerge.

It’s not a neat, step-by-step path. We move back and forth, and sometimes we’re in more than one phase at once. But this map helps us make sense of the psychological shifts we must make to find ourselves in our next new beginning.

The work of transition spans the whole journey. But the deepest work happens in the bridge between the old and the new: that middle place, the neutral zone. Something I and others prefer to call the liminal space.

This idea is far older than Bridges. Tibetan Buddhism has a word for it: bardo, meaning “the in-between”. It most often describes the space between an old version of us dying and a new version being reborn. The way I’ve come to understand it, the bardo is a place where there is nothing but the recollection of what was. It’s a time to draw out the essence of the joy and the wisdom from what has been, to carry that essence forward, and to prepare for who we are becoming.

I find that deeply consoling. It suggests that the in-between, the liminal space, isn’t empty. It is where we gather what matters from what’s ended, so we can bring it with us into the new that’s just beginning.

We expect endings, and we hope for new beginnings. What no one prepares us for is the in-between – liminal space. Yet, it’s where we quietly grow.

If you recognise yourself in any of this, you don’t need the words for it yet. Simply acknowledging maybe I’m in transition can be the first step in turning towards it.

So what does this in-between space actually feel like, day to day, from the inside? That’s where I’ll take you next.

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