People rarely talk about transitions. They’d rather talk about changes, because changes are the visible part of the iceberg. It’s easy to see that someone changed their shirts based on the color of the shirt; the shirt changes, the circumstances change. So, people’s attention is fixed on the change, the circumstances, but not so much on what these changes mean for those affected. If changing shirts, is typically done fairly automatically, other changes require a time of adaptation between the “before” and “after”; this period of time is the transition.

We actually go through many transitions during our day, but because most of them are part of our routine, we don’t pay much attention to them. Let’s take an example. Leaving your workplace and coming back home. What goes on in your mind from the moment you close your computer to the moment you get home? You may be thinking of things that happened during your work day, or you may already anticipate what will need to be done once you get home. These thoughts can generate a feeling of relief, or on the contrary, stress, or a variety of feelings. It doesn’t matter whether we qualify these feelings as “positive” or “negative”. They are all part of this transition that we go through.

If getting home after work is a daily occurrence, life also offers us other more significant changes, such as choosing a career, starting a new job, getting married, having a first child…. Those are pretty obvious, and as they are considered “positive”, people will easily congratulate and support you when you go through those major changes in your life. We also go through more subtle changes, that may be qualified “positive” from the outside, but not so obvious from the inside. Having our adult children move on to the next stage of their lives is one of those. Though on the one hand, we, as parents, may feel happy for our children that they go on to follow their own path, it may leave us feeling empty, without purpose and sad.  That’s where the transition from being a parent with kids at home and becoming an empty nester can become challenging, especially as from the outside, friends and family may not understand that this major change in our life could leave us so unmotivated.