I hadn’t planned on writing a second post about our move, then thought I would have to because I wouldn’t have time or energy to do anything else, but as it happened (or is still happening), I realized that I had learned some things from it that will have an impact on my work going forward. In it, I found myself returning to the work William Bridges did on transitions which we used at Search for Common Ground in the early 2000s. I hadn’t used his ideas a lot since then. Nonetheless, as we met some of our new neighbors and the staff at The Oak, I realized that our one common denominator was that we were making major life transitions in ways that Bridges would have appreciated if he were still alive.
To see where I’m heading, consider the words in the image at the beginning of this post which I will keep coming back to in the rest of it.
It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions. Change is not the same as transition. Change is situational; the new site, the new boss, the new team roles, the new policy. Transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the new situation. Change is external; transition is internal.
Coincidentally, while we were moving, I read Lizzie Wade’s remarkable new book, Apocalypse, that makes the seemingly counterintuitive point that sometimes humans make huge progress after some sort of wrenching change occurs because they learned the right lessons from the causes and consequences of their particular apocalypse. While no one would confuse our move with Cortez’s arrival in what is today’s Mexico City five centuries ago, Wade’s historical examples reinforced my recollection of what Bridges had to say.
But let me deal with the silly stuff first.
Predictable Stress and Slightly Less Predictable Response
The move went well, but you might not have thought so if you had access to the stories I was telling myself in the weeks leading up to the move and the unpacking of all the boxes (which is almost complete). That self-chatter was all to familiar to me in ways that seems almost funny in retrospect but are probably worth taking seriously as the emotional part of what has so far been largely a physical transition.
You see, despite what I may say in these posts and my general optimism about the “real world,” I’m a worry wort when it comes to everyday life.
I like to blame it on my mother, who had next to no faith in her fellow humans and for whom trust in others was an utterly alien concept.
Luckily, I missed out on almost all of that.
Except.
I worry that if something could go wrong, it will. But, of course, that almost never happens.
In this case, the anxiety started with something simple and not all that absurd. Would our house sell? Especially with DOGE ripping apart the DC area work force? We got competing offers over the asking price within six hours of listing the place. Nonetheless, my anxieties got magnified when it turned out that the buyer needed to finance the purchase and thought they needed another week before closing. We closed on time.
Would the wire from the sale get to our account or would the one to the condo get to them? Of course they did, with days to spare.
Would the mover get to us on time and clear out all of the junk that we didn’t have room for? Of course they did. Not only did they do a great job, they took all of the stuff we didn’t have room for and donated it to Habitat for Humanity.
There were some minor worries that turned out to be clichéd mountains and clichéd molehills. For an eternity (in fact, less than 12 hours), I thought that the box that contained my Mac Mini, keyboard, webcam, microphone, and a zillion cables and chargers had gotten lost. I went so far as to put replacements for all of them in my Amazon cart. Then, of course, I found the box. I remembered that it was in a blue milk crate. Turns out the milk crate was white. And the movers labeled it as coming from a different room in our old house.
Of course, all of those worries were, well, crazy. The realtors, movers, financial advisors and others we worked with are all professionals whom we had either worked with for years or vetted when it came time to move.
The problem, of course, is me.
I really don’t have anything to worry about along these lines. We are financially set. I could afford to replace my Mac many times over and still have plenty of money left over. In fact, the condo we just bought cost $250,000 less than we got from the sale of our house—which is going to be torn down and replaced with what we call a MacMansion in the DC suburbs.
In fact, we’ve only had one problem. The hot water didn’t work Monday morning, our third day in the condo. It was fixed within an hour.
It really is time that I got over my worrywortiness.
Interesting First Signs
In fact, the move has been amazingly upbeat which is what brought me back to Bridges’ work on transitions.
As his statement in the image that begins this chapter suggests, the challenge doesn’t lie in the changes in your life. Rather, it lies in how you manage the transition from one reality to the next one, a new reality that you can help shape yourself.
As a person who likes routines in my daily life, change can be disruptive.
In fact, once I get beyond the silly worry wort in me, I’ve learned to embrace change because it almost always gives me an opportunity to constructively restructure what I think and do if I follow something like the model Bridges first laid out more than thirty years ago.
Again, it makes sense start with some of the little things that have happened in the four days that we have lived in The Oak and in the immediate run-up to our move that suggest that once I got over my worry wort side, I had internalized enough of his lessons to make the moving in phase much more enjoyable and rewarding than the run up to our departure from Primrose Drive.
That starts with the staff and the developers behind the larger community we are joining. I’m rarely a fan of real estate developers, but the Hoffman group has a long history of masterminding integrated, socially, and environmentally responsible planned urban and suburban communities. That’s reflected in everything from the physical design of the neighborhood down to the way the sales staff took a personal interest in Gretchen and me. Which, of course, meant that we took a personal interest in them.
They also arranged a social gathering for the forty or so families that have already committed to buying a unit in our building. So, two days before we moved in, we met a few of our soon-to-be neighbors and had more engaged conversations with them than we had with our former neighbors, some of whom we have shared Primrose Drive with for two or three decades.
Then, when we got in, the building manager, the folks who staff the front desk 24/7, and the building engineer made us feel at home. They seemed genuinely interested in who we are and what makes us tick. Their goal is to add aspects of an intentional community to life at The Oak, taking advantage of its indoor club room, gym, and huge outdoor patio replete with barbecues, comfy lawn chairs, and big screen TVs. I’ve already suggested a screening and discussion of Pete and Becky Davis’s documentary about Bob Putnam, Join or Die, since they both went to high school on the site where The Oak now sits and, Pete at least, still lives in Falls Church.
Bridges and Building Bridges Across Moments in Time
In the end, the staff gets a lot of things right even if they hadn’t read a word Bridges or any organizational change expert had written.
As he saw it, any transition has the three component parts as reflected in this chart. Each can blend into each other. In fact, to the degree that we can’t separate the stages, transitions tend to become messy and even catastrophic which I eerily discovered in a wholly different context while devouring Lizzie Wade’s remarkably upbeat new book, Apocalypse, which turned out to be a great read while molving.
The transition starts with an acknowledgement that the old world is gone. We had to say goodbye to a house that we had shared for 35 years and Gretchen had bought more than 40 years ago. Lots of memories. We brought a couple of momentos but mostly made a clean break even though The Oak and Primrose Drive are less than a mile apart.
Our move certainly isn’t the kind of apocalypse Wade writes about, but it is important than anyone going through a major transition acknowledge that we aren’t going back. That we can’t go back. No more garden. No more hand-made street number on our house (though we did bring that with us).
Then, Bridges talks about being in a Neutral Zone in which an individual or, in his case, organization has to come to grips with the fact that we can control some—and maybe even a lot—of what happens to us during the transition. I could—and did—plan for potential problems moving funds long before we had to, thereby making my internal worry wort side all the more absurd. Our challenge now is to embrace the future and make what we can of it. We don’t have much of a view (unless you like parking garages). A lot of the storage space in the kitchen is up to high for us to reach other than with a step ladder (we did bring one).
But, we have a lot to look forward to. Our living area is good sized and comfortable, as is the dining room. We have them arranged in such a way that we don’t see the open-plan kitchen unless we crane our necks. The bedroom and study are both bigger and brighter than anything we’ve had before. No more gloomy Zoom meetings even with a bunch of light rings. We spent more money than we dreamed possible outfitting two closets, one of which is big enough to have been my office. So, when (and if) we get organized, our place will be a lot neater.
Although we were waiting for the movers to arrive when someone reminded me of Bridges’ model. So, at that point, I really focused my attention at shrinking the length of the neutral zone.
To that end, I actually adapted his six key points to our needs while we went moved six blocks but also feels like six time zones.
- We spent a lot of time talking about why moving at this point in our life made sense because we should be able to spend the next few years enjoying not having to do things like shovel snow or mow the lawn.
- We incorporated the small number of others in our network who would be affected by the move. That was mostly Gretchen’s daughter and her family but we actually live a few hundred yards closer to them. And Evonne has discovered the sauna that recently opened in another building in our community.
- We—really I—had to spend a lot of time doing what Bridges called an audie of our transition readiness. I was the problem here. I like my routines. Even though I didn’t love our 1950s era ranch house, we had it set up so that we still had room for 5,000 books (almost all of which we donated) and I had three different rooms I could work in. But once I saw the first new rental property we looked at, I was ready to move. I could see how that it would be better..
- Gretchen and I and the rest of the family as well as our friends at AfP and the other places we work at are also comfortable with the move—especially since our common room is big enough to hold AfP board meetings and our ED, Liz Hume, lives around the corner.
- We are paying attention to how we each are handling the move. Even more importantly, so is the staff here at The Oak.
- Finally, we are beginning to see ways we can work even with the handful of people we’ve met to do some programming that would add to the sense of community that The Oak staff is creating.
A Hefty Does of Reinhold Niebuhr Always Helps
Last but by no means least, the move has led me to see the power of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer in yet another light. As you undoubtedly know, these words have been used in a wide variety of settings from building peace movements to ending twelve step meetings.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
Here, I had next to no control over what the settlement companies let alone the stock market did. All I could was make it as easy as possible for them to do their jobs which my worry wort self excels at.
Now that the move is all but done, I can focus on the things I can control, which definitely includes how we deal with the new people we are meeting, some of whom have already shown some interest in the work we are doing with Peacebuilding Starts at Home, Strangers Guide, Rotary, and more.
What fun!
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.
