“It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions. Change is situational, transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation. Change is external, transition is internal.”

 — William Bridges

This quote got me thinking about the time when I first came to the United Kingdom.

The first six months were a doddle. Everything was new and exciting. Then the novelty wore off. The glitz dulled and everyday normality set in. This ‘normality’ was not the ‘normality’ I knew back in South Africa. Not at home and certainly not at work.

At least at home, I had some measure of control.

Even the situation at work was in some ways similar to the time I changed my career from radiography to computer programming. For a long time, I had no idea what was going on. For all I knew they spoke Urdu, Swahili, or some other foreign language. After a while, around month six or seven, things slowly began to make sense.

Ah! A glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel!

‘Not so fast,’ my team leader said, ‘Beware, it may just be the light of an oncoming train!’

So yes, I could rationalize the situation at work and knew it would pass.

But there was something else going on here.

At times it just felt like I was wading through treacle. That was new. I had not experienced something like that before. Until now.

Now I am starting out on something new again and more often than not, that old treacle feeling envelops me and I feel that I am waist-deep wading through a sticky, cloying, viscosity.

Oh yes, I know about feelings, I am responsible for how I feel. Thoughts drive my feelings.

I want to sidestep that for a minute and focus on what William Bridges notes:

“It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions. Change is situational, transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation. Change is external, transition is internal.”

Think for a minute… you know your life, your attitudes, your beliefs, your likes, and your dislikes.

They form a blueprint for how you live your life and make your decisions. They become so automatic you don’t even notice that you have them, operate from them.

Then the world around you changes. Suddenly you find yourself in a different context. The blueprint by which you operated your life no longer works quite like it used to. It can leave you feeling vulnerable, frustrated, and puzzled.

A new blueprint is required to deal with the new situation.

So do we consciously work out a new set of attitudes, beliefs, likes and dislikes when we realize things are not quite working as usual?

I think it is more likely that old beliefs and attitudes come up against a brick wall, then slowly disintegrate and are eventually replaced by new ones. That is if we are open to it.

And while this process is going on, we look at the world around us through our ‘cracked mirror’ of old attitudes and beliefs and swirling mists of half-formed new ideas.

This now is our ‘tool’ for how we live our lives and make our decisions, except, it is far from clear and continually shifting as it adjusts and accommodates new information from our changed world – hence the wading through treacle while our inner adjusts to our outer world.

So now I know what’s going on when I get that old treacle feeling!

I wonder,  how do other people experience this internal shift in their inner world?