Navigating Transitions in a Time of Never-Ending Transitions

I’ve wanted to write about the normal transitions in life and tools to help navigate them with greater grace and ease to more satisfying results. How we dance with change is an important skill for living intentionally and taking more responsibility for what we experience as adults, no matter the age. Life is forever having us transition from one moment to the next, from one situation to the next, one age to the next.

AND...there is in me this need to communicate, too, about broader, more situation specific transitions, such as ones we are going through now as humanity. No matter what you believe about what’s real and what’s really happening, the experiences of the real are beginning to diverge more extraordinarily causing more fragmentation of societies everywhere. I will attempt to do both by talking about the latter first.

This has been a long season of continual transition and adjustment...almost 3 years worth. Some of us have come into being adults during this time, some of have come into being elders during this time and many have been navigating through raising children, watching them launch and recreating our lives anew post 24/7 parenthood.

Expansion and Contraction

We have grown through this time in both expansive and in contractive ways. More people are beginning to recognize their own agency and responsibility for their own experience. We are beginning to see how traumatizing life can be and the impact of how people behave as adults. What it might mean to be engaged citizens in this time of increasing control over our lives, to be spiritual beings having a human experience...a different kind of human experience than the one we were having before. That’s empowering and energizing.

YET... so many in media, politics, and corporations are masters of fear mongering messages - it’s the only tactic they know. This is not new, this training us to be fearful about the unknown that’s just around the bend. And it’s worked, anxiety and depression have been on the rise. People are more judgmental, polarizing and vilifying than ever before.

Collectively, we’re contracted in fear, defensiveness and feeling the need to be on the attack, taught to feel threatened by those who make different decisions than their neighbors and loved ones. Those feeling ostracized are living in fear, too. And then there are those who think all of this is overblown (in denial?) and those who are more solidly living from a place of empathy and compassion, rather than judgment and polarization.

Everyone is on this journey of expansion and everyone reacts differently to it.

We have these parallel tracks of increasing fear-based reactivity decreasing many people’s willingness to think critically to increase capacity to live free from the control of fear. It’s really quite fascinating in this way.

Even the most positive of people, know that these are not normal times. The great thing about unstable times is that there is so much more possibility for growth and positive change, so much more opportunity for transformation and making huge leaps of conscious awareness, so I will always choose to be focused on what’s possible. AND because I am who I am, I will always have an eye towards both that which propels us and that which blocks us from healing and growth.

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

AND we are also opening up more to the power and freedom we have to manifest possibilities not available in a stable, staid world. “They were the best of times and the worst of times,” so the saying goes. I choose to believe that we are evolving and while we are raising our vibrations, healing and shedding the pain of the past, there is still much suffering in the world.