A beautiful article from The Atlantic got shared with me through the grapevine called “The Clocklike Regularity of Major Life Changes”.
It’s recommended reading for a year that has been full of change on a global, community, and individual level for everyone:
“Transitions feel like an abnormal disruption to life, but in fact, they are a predictable and integral part of it. While each change may be novel, major life transitions happen with clocklike regularity. Life is one long string of them, in fact.”
My friend Lin has a tattoo of the phases of the moon to remember the cycle, the waxing and waning, the certainty that things change.
“Uncertainty” is a word that will scratch at my ears for a lifetime after this year (closely followed by “unprecedented” — we need a new vocabulary), but there is something comforting about reframing the uncertainty as part of a natural cycle.
The article goes on to say, “Even difficult, unwanted transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than in real time. Indeed, Feiler found that 90 percent of the time, the people he spoke with ultimately judged their transition to have been a success, insofar as the transition ended and they found themselves once again on solid ground.”
Yesterday marked four years since I went to court alone to finalize my divorce. It was one of the most painful days of my life, and I wouldn’t even have remembered the date this year if my Snapchat memories hadn’t shown me a picture of a mini cheesecake and a bottle of champagne (gifted by my very kind coworkers). That particular major life transition — one of the “lifequakes” as the article names them — was a success. It just took getting through it to see it that way.
I don’t know anyone who is not grappling with major changes right now. Beyond what’s happening with the pandemic, a racial reckoning, an election . . . normal life changes and transitions soldier on and many “normal” individual transitions are spurred and inspired by the changes of our collective experiences this year.
I’ll leave it at this Uncle Iroh quote:
“Sometimes life is like this dark tunnel. You can’t always see the light at the end of the tunnel, but if you just keep moving… you will come to a better place.”
With Love,
Natalie