Transitions: The Neutral Zone

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And we have arrived at… The Neutral Zone! (Enter your own sound effect here). As I reach the fourth installment of my summer ramble series featuring William Bridges Transitions model, I admit I am finding it really hard to summarize his work. Frankly, I just want you all to read the book, but in lieu of that, here is an attempt to encapsulate Bridges’ description of the Neutral Zone, the middle stage of any transition process, and what he describes as, ‘The place between two somewheres.’

After that (endings), you encounter the neutral zone – that apparently in-between time when, under the surface... the transformation is going on. Everything feels up for grabs and you don’t know who you are or how you are supposed to behave, so it feels like a meaningless time. But it is actually a very important time. During your time in the neutral zone, you are receiving signals and cues…  as to what you need to become for the next stage of your life. And, unless you disrupt it by trying to rush through the neutral zone quickly, you are slowly being transformed into the person you need to be to move forward in your life.

Yup. It’s that easy. Simply spend an extended period of time not knowing who you are, where you are going, and serve that up with a heaping side of uncertainty. Sign me UP! Well, as it happens, I have signed up for it a couple of times and likely you have too. In fact, I just exited what I anticipate will be the most significant neutral zone of my life. I entered the zone on February 24th, 2020, on the day I left NYC, and exited on June 24th, 2022, the day I closed on my house in VT. Two years and four months in the place between two somewheres. Following my difficult ending experience, I was deeply relieved to have the chance to step back and get lost for a while. I was hopeful that if listened hard enough, and for long enough, that both the yelling and whispering voices I was hearing would guide me towards my new beginning. And they did.

Here are Bridges’ six suggestions for how to navigate and maximize your time in the ‘zone’

1)      Accept your need for this time in the neutral zone. But, beware of the traps of fast forward and reverse... Opt for the turtle, forget about the hare. At the same time, do keep moving. The transition that bought you to this place cannot be undone.

2)      Find a regular time and place to be alone. People in transition are often still involved in activities and relationships that continue to bombard them with cues irrelevant to their emerging needs. The real need is for a genuine sort of aloneness in which inner signals can make themselves heard.

3)      Begin a log of neutral zone experiences. Yes, it is a paradox to talk about emptiness and then to suggest that something there is worth noting. The point is that we need to resist the tendency to imagine that what is needed is external to our situation.

4)      Take this pause in the action of your life to write an autobiography. Because recollection is likely to turn up some useful information about other transitions in your past. And because that past is an artifact from another time and probably needs revision.

5)      Take the opportunity to discover what you really want… Wanting turns out to be a far less clear matter than we usually imagine, for it is overlayed with a lifetime of guilt and ambivalence. So here you are now, in a position to get a little of what you want after all these years, and you find yourself unsure and confused. How can you move past this difficulty and use your real wantings to orient you toward the future.

6)      Take a few days to go on your own version of a passage journey. Must be an unfamiliar place! The retreat is a journey into emptiness and a time to cultivate receptivity. The more you leave behind, the more room you have to find something new.

There are over 40,000 accounts of mystics retreating into nature. Most of our spiritual and religious leaders entered the Neutral Zone; Mohammed, Abraham, Christ, Moses, and of course Thoreau.  When I was preparing to write this Ramble, I took a couple of hikes on the Appalachian trail which is just over a mile from my house in VT. It’s the time of year when many thru hikers are reaching VT with around 400 miles to go until they end their journey by climbing Mt. Katahdin in Maine. It’s humbling to share the trail with these pilgrims and to walk in the footsteps of the many souls whose lives have been changed forever by a 5 month walk in the woods. I was reminded how much I enjoyed reading the book ‘Wild’ by Cheryl Strayed. Following the death of her mother. Strayed, a very inexperienced hiker, impulsively decided to walk the 2653-mile Pacific Crest Trail. Solo. She spoke about her experience with Oprah.

Oprah: What did this hike teach you?
Cheryl: Acceptance. I had to accept the fact of the hour. The fact of the mile. The fact of the summer. The facts of my life. Over and over again, I found that if I could accept those difficult things, everything else sort of gave way. Each step led me to the next step, the next truth that was going to reveal itself. We all suffer. We all have heartbreak. We all have difficult things. They're part of life. Realizing that was very profound for me. The PCT gave me a really grand sense of humility, which is what you need so you can keep walking in ways both literal and metaphorical.
Oprah: Who would you be if you had not done this hike? Who are you because you did it?
Cheryl: I think I would still be me; I would have found what I needed to find, but in a different way. Still, everything I am is born of my experience on the trail. I feel like I literally walked my way into the life I have now. Nine days after my hike, I met Brian, my husband; several years later we got married and had our children. I walked all those miles, and I learned all those lessons. It's as if my new life was the gift I got at the end of a long struggle.

Strayed needed and chose an extreme neutral zone experience. We don’t have to retreat to the woods for months to find our next path. But it is a time to explore, experiment, and to take yourself out of your comfort zone. The Neutral Zone also has the potential to be an extremely creative time. If there are places you have always wanted to visit, hobbies you’ve toyed with trying, languages you keep saying you’ll learn, or communities you are curious to join, this is the time. These gaps in our existence happen a handful of times in our lives, at most. Our culture promotes productivity and rewards overworking.  We say, ‘I don’t have time’ all the time, and sometimes we don’t.  But many times, it’s simply not true, we do have the time but we choose, mostly subconsciously, not to take it. Our daily lives are so compounded with the normal way of doing things, that even the concept of ‘choices’ is not visible to us. Shame, guilt, the expectations others have us, and especially those we have of ourselves, holds us in place. So, if an ending opens a up window of time, take it. Seize it. Enter the neutral zone.

Stay there for a while and perhaps your new beginning will emerge.