Hello! New look. New functionality. New categories. Gosh. And lots of new to-do lists to make the site work the way I want it. So to take transitions as my theme today seems rather apt.
Transitions. It’s part of a book title, and it’s a way of thinking about books you want alongside you when there are sea changes going on in life.
Some people despise self-help books. Some people lap them up – clearly, they must, or there would be no giant self-help sections in bookshops, airport shops and so on.
I guess the kind of books I am thinking of are not strictly self-help books. They are the equivalent of a good friend who will listen to your rants, your self-accusations, your occasional moments of incoherence at life when you don’t know whether to cry or just to cough.
They are books where you read of others’ struggles, others’ attempts to make sense of changes in their lives. And some way in, you discover that the book is quietly having a conversation with your struggles, drawing them up into consciousness again, before gently smoothing them down in a new configuration.
Transitions, by William Bridges, is a bit of a classic. Clearly a lot of people have found it helpful. Equally, I recommended it to someone one time, and it wasn’t his thing at all.
But it all depends on the kind of companion you want while you rant, or ponder. (And it does help if you’re prepared to use myths and legends as pictures for your own story’s twists and turns, as Bridges offers.)
Where I came into this experience of books was with Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. I was having a bit of a transitional year, and I chanced across this book which belonged to a flatmate.
Nouwen tells his own story, but leaves plenty of space to make connections with your own. He looks at the figures in the story of the prodigal son: the prodigal (and younger) son, the elder son who stays at home, and the father.
He encourages us to see life as offering a transition through these archetypes, to finally embrace the role of the father, who waits, daily, for the return of the prodigal, yet still puts aside decorum to rush towards him when he finally appears.
The book also tells the parable through the medium of Rembrandt’s painting of the Prodigal Son, the cover for the book. Nouwen’s musings on the separate figures in the painting are insightful, as are his comments on how the artist has drawn out different aspects of them through particular painting techniques.
There is something of being offered another’s story – flexible, expansive, elemental – as a mirror in which to catch glimpses of our own story. By offering several stories at once – autobiography, parable and art criticism – Nouwen offers plenty of space in which to insert our own details, and our own sense of narrative.
The beauty of these kind of books is that they do not prescribe. They can offer means for understanding places where we feel stuck, places where we are changing at one level but nothing is happening at other levels.
Bridges is useful in offering his Neutral Zone, where we are no longer in the ‘old world’ – and not yet entirely in the new one either. And Nouwen shows how easy it is to be stuck in the place of older brother, judging others yet unable to embrace the joy that the father has to offer to us as well.
We may look at these books as places to come up for air, after holding our breath. We may gulp them down at times, or eat our fill and return to savour them on other occasions.
We may even look at them on our bookshelves as markers themselves: “this is where I was. This book reminds me that I am no longer there.”
Sometimes, we want to be reminded of what we are no longer – as well as to look towards what we may become.