If you don't love transitions, read this
It will take two minutes, and make you calmer and happier
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been filled with apprehension before a big transition—only to find that it all worked out, in the end.
Here are just a few examples from my first seventeen years of life. If I went through all fifty-seven years, the list would go for pages:
—The first morning of Kindergarten, when I didn’t know how to ask the other kids if I could play with the wagon, too.
—The first afternoon of first grade, when I was terrified of getting on the wrong bus home.
—The summer before leaving for college—the place I’d always dreamed of—but which suddenly felt like altogether too much.
I loved kindergarten, first grade, and college—but if I’d followed my own aversion to transition, I might never have gone to school at all.
These days, I don’t worry about transitions quite as much. But I still have my moments. Maybe you do, too. Just this morning, it hit me with a shock: my days, once so full of children and teenagers, really are going to be emptier soon—and will need filling up in ways I have yet to invent.
So I hope you’ll read this short poem by Kahlil Gibran. It takes two minutes. It names something we rarely say out loud about fear. And it offers something which may be even rarer: a way through it.
I hope you loved this one as much as I do.
And a few prompts, for discussion:
How do you generally feel about transitions?
How do you feel about the ultimate transition of death, which I think is what this poem is ultimately about?
What do you think of the metaphor of a river becoming the ocean?
At the age of 72, I think about the transition to death a lot more these days. It's scary and sobering, as I watch and feel the inevitable changes in my body. The circle of life is real, much more real at this age. I don't know how to handle it well, as I have never been this age before, but handle it I must. And one lesson certainly seems to be to truly be present to each moment and appreciate each day. I have sometimes loved transitions (could not wait to go away to college) and sometimes been terrified or hated them...marriage to divorce....youth to middle age to elderhood.....but it's all a learning journey. And now I give myself permission to take a day away every now and then, crawl under the covers and peek out until I am ready to come out again..giving my inner introvert the time she needs to pick up and start again.
I love the Gibran passage! It reminds me of Leonard Cohen's wonderful phrase: "If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick everyday."
So hard to trust that when one is so sensitive and so aware (of life and death), but ever important to be reminded that we're not alone in navigating it. Thanks for this lovely reminder!