Setting the pace for Major Life Transitions
I announced I would launch this blog in March 2021, nearly 2 years ago. I had the ideas, content and website. I even had subscribers (beyond my parents, who admittedly were signed up without their consent). But no blog emerged.
What was going on? Why wasn’t I moving faster? Why couldn’t I keep up with my blog-writing peers?
I won’t belabour you with my responses to these questions (let’s just say there was a long list, I have quite creative inner critics). My mind was heavy with self-doubt.
But I’ve come to realise that my speed was never an issue. Rather, the problem was the judgment I was putting on my pace.
The human race
I love children’s stories. Aesop’s fables in particular left me with an enduring appreciation for morals (and an equally persistent fear of making ‘bad’ decisions).
In one of his most popular parables, a tortoise races against a hare. The message was: "Slow and steady wins the race."
However I was never convinced this was really true. Surely it was possible to be a more strategic hare.
I don't think I'd be the only one to question Aesop's logic. There's a strong societal undercurrent promoting the idea that we're born into a race. It appears we’re running against everyone else in the world as well as battling our expectations of ourselves.
The destination is Success: fame, wealth, (influencer) status, social impact, nirvana. Maybe we don’t even know what Success means to us; but know that without it, we risk being deemed a Failure.
The message we receive in the West is that Faster is Better. The more quickly we achieve Success, the more Successful we are (bonus points!). We have scores of time management textbooks available to help us become more ‘efficient’: Time Management Ninjas, Time Warrior, Competing Against Time. (Good luck to all of us who choose to compete against a social construct). Hurry up, clock’s ticking!
That used to be me: I would recount, with pride, how a summer working in New York taught me to speed-walk between appointments while also talking on the phone and eating my lunch. My yoga teacher would not approve.
With no speed limit, life becomes a thrilling, stimulating and absolutely unsustainable marathon. We often keep going until something happens that forces us to stop in our tracks (for me, quite literally, when I was hit by a car as a pedestrian).
At that point, we might realise it’s time for a big change: a Major Life Transition.
(But a quick one, please, because there are so many things I need to do, ASAP!)
Where Aesop got it right
Transitions take us out of our comfort zones and plunge us deep into unfamiliar territory. That uncertainty can be scary and uncomfortable, which is even more motivation to get it over and done with as quickly as possible.
But launching full-throttle into the great unknown is often a terrible strategy for transformation.
My attempts to race to the transition finish line ironically took me right back to my starting point: the same ‘self’ as I’d been before. Maybe slightly modified, but certainly not transformed. I went from running a social impact organisation, to coaching and consulting in the same sector.
I was clearly not the strategic hare I thought I was.
It turns out that trying to recreate our identities is a massive undertaking. It’s like birthing a new version of ourselves. If we try to rush the gestation period, we risk destroying or losing sight of the potential inside of us, yearning to emerge.
There’s no point rushing a transition; instead, this is where we need to channel our inner tortoise and slow down.
How slow can you go?
Slow living allows us to savour life, not just taste it. It gives us the spaciousness to observe, reflect and listen fully to our inner compass, which is our most trustworthy guide during transitions.
A slower pace favours art, wisdom and fortune. The creative muse doesn't visit on demand. Depth of insight isn’t gleaned from a quick scan. Serendipity can't be scheduled.
Even the purported light-bulb moment that we yearn for during times of transition – that moment where everything begins to make sense – is not the instant ‘Aha!’ that it's made out to be. Instead, it's a tipping point. It’s the culmination of many accumulated thoughts, perceptions and observations that foment slowly, over time, often subconsciously, and suddenly crystallise into something tangible.
Slow down externally, to move fast internally
It was during a time of painstaking slowness (albeit a reluctant submission to injury rather than an enthusiastic choice) that I found clarity on my professional direction.
After the car accident, I felt lost in the wilderness of possibility and impossibility. My previous approach would have been to thrust myself into a series of intensive self-discovery seminars, online courses and coaching sessions. I would have fired bullets in all directions until one hit a target.
But now, recovering from a concussion that rendered thinking and reading painful, I spent months learning to ‘be’ by ‘doing’ what felt like nothing. My days were spent sitting, meditating, observing, journalling, strolling in silence in nature. My movements felt agonisingly lethargic. But as I slowed down externally, my internal development accelerated. And it was during this period that I became aware, for the first time consciously, that I wanted to write (and here we are today!)
“Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are.” — Will Ferrell
Life in the Slow Lane Ain’t Easy
Slow is not synonymous with easy.
Slowing down can be uncomfortable and scary. We may fear the fabric of our familiar lives will unravel. But that's exactly what needs to happen for us to fully and intentionally transition from one way of being, into another.
In many ways, moving slowly is harder than going quickly. When we slow down, we notice all the dirt we've been sweeping under the carpet. Unwelcome thoughts and feelings. Pain and fatigue. Tensions in relationships. Unhappiness. And also, literal dirt – it’s incredible how much dust can colonise a bedroom corner!
Managing the emotional turbulence associated with personal growth requires significant energy. Moving slowly helps us to conserve that strength for the bumpy ride ahead. There’s no way to know how long it will last; it could take months, years, an entire lifetime. So we need to keep our batteries charged.
Ready, Set, Slow!
The advice my teacher most frequently gives me is this: Slow down. And, Slow down further.
I often catch myself in a rush: moving quickly, speaking quickly, judging myself for taking ‘too long’ (including on writing this blog – I’m aware of the irony). And I try to ask myself at those points: Why am I hurrying?
Usually it’s because of a self-expectation that I should be going faster. The urgency is an aftertaste of stale societal expectations, a remnant of my previous life approach. There is rarely a real need to race.
Rather than berate myself for not having run a few laps around the blog circuit, I choose to proudly plod along at my own pace through transition.
I may not know where I’m heading (that’s the adventure), but I know how to get there.
Reflection
What is your relationship with pace?
How do you feel about ‘speed’, ‘productivity’ and ‘success’ in relation to your own life? What might change if you lived a slower-paced life?
Has there been a time in your life when you’ve been forced to slow down? If so what was that like? What changed?
Embodied Meditation
Try moving as slowly as possible. Now move even more slowly. How does it feel? What do you observe around you? What thoughts arise?
I would love to hear your reflections, questions and puns! Please share them with me.
FAQ: What are Major Life Transitions? How are they different than Changes?
Transitions are not Changes. Transitions are psychological. Change is contextual.
Major Life Transitions involve a period of being in-between identities, a dark void without clarity, a state of stillness within motion. They bring us into the liminal space: the boundary between what was, and what is to come.
We know we're in a Transition when we undergo a deep, raw, often excoriating process of losing our sense of self. We question our identities. Transitions include multiple changes - to our health, career, relationships, finances, geographies, etc - but they're not synonymous with Change.
Although caterpillars can grow up to 100 times their size, move locations, and even change colours, those are still changes. But when caterpillars enter into the pupa and turn into butterflies, they’re in a Transition: a complete metamorphoses of identity.
