Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age - Hardcover

Feiler, Bruce

 
9781594206825: Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1594206821 ISBN 13: 9781594206825
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times bestseller! 

A pioneering and timely study of how to navigate life's biggest transitions with meaning, purpose, and skill

Bruce Feiler, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Secrets of Happy Families and Council of Dads, has long explored the stories that give our lives meaning. Galvanized by a personal crisis, he spent the last few years crisscrossing the country, collecting hundreds of life stories in all fifty states from Americans who’d been through major life changes—from losing jobs to losing loved ones; from changing careers to changing relationships; from getting sober to getting healthy to simply looking for a fresh start. He then spent a year coding these stories, identifying patterns and takeaways that can help all of us survive and thrive in times of change.

What Feiler discovered was a world in which transitions are becoming more plentiful and mastering the skills to manage them is more urgent for all of us. The idea that we’ll have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness is hopelessly outdated. We all feel unnerved by this upheaval. We’re concerned that our lives are not what we expected, that we’ve veered off course, living life out of order. But we’re not alone.

Life Is in the Transitions introduces the fresh, illuminating vision of the nonlinear life, in which each of us faces dozens of disruptors. One in ten of those becomes what Feiler calls a lifequake, a massive change that leads to a life transition. The average length of these transitions is five years. The upshot: We all spend half our lives in this unsettled state. You or someone you know is going through one now.

The most exciting thing Feiler identified is a powerful new tool kit for navigating these pivotal times. Drawing on his extraordinary trove of insights, he lays out specific strategies each of us can use to reimagine and rebuild our lives, often stronger than before.

From a master storyteller with an essential message, Life Is in the Transitions can move readers of any age to think deeply about times of change and how to transform them into periods of creativity and growth.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bruce Feiler is the author of six consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including The Secrets of Happy Families, The Council of Dads, and Walking the Bible. He's the writer/presenter of two primetime series on PBS, and his two TED Talks have been viewed more than two million times. A native of Savannah, Georgia, Bruce lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Linda Rottenberg, and their twin daughters.

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INTRODUCTION
 
The Life Story Project
 
What Happens When Our Fairy Tales Go Awry
 
I used to believe that phone calls don’t change your life, until one day I got a phone call that did. It was from my mother. “Your father is trying to kill himself.”

“He’s what?”

Suddenly she was talking and I wasn’t really following. Something about a bathroom, a razor, a desperate lunge for relief.

“Good God.”

“And that wasn’t the last time. Later he tried to climb out of a window while I was scrambling eggs.”

As a writer, I’m often asked whether I learned to write from my dad. The answer is no. My father was uncommonly friendly, even twinkling— we called him a professional Savannahian, for the seaside city in Georgia where he’d lived for eighty years—but he was more of a listener and a doer than a teller and a scribbler. A navy veteran, civic leader, Southern Demo- crat, he was never depressed a minute in his life.

Until he got Parkinson’s, a disease that affects your mobility—and your mood. My dad’s father, who also got the disease late in life, shot himself in the head a month before I graduated from high school. My father had promised for years he wouldn’t do the same. “I know the pain—and shame—it causes.”

Then he changed his mind—or at least that part of his mind he could still control. “I’ve lived a full life,” he said. “I don’t want to be mourned; I want to be celebrated.”
Six times in the next twelve weeks my father attempted to end his life. We tried every remedy imaginable, from counseling to electroconvulsive therapy. Yet we couldn’t surmount his core challenge: He had lost a reason to live.

My family, always a bit hyperfunctional, dove in. My older brother took over the family real estate business; my younger sister helped research medical treatments.

But I’m the narrative guy. For three decades, I had devoted my life to exploring the stories that give our lives meaning—from the tribal gather- ings of the ancient world to the chaotic family dinners of today. I have long been consumed by how stories connect and divide us on a societal level, how they define and deflate us on a personal level.

Given this interest, I began to wonder: If my dad was facing a narrative problem, at least in part, maybe it demanded a narrative solution. Maybe what my father needed was a spark to restart his life story.

One Monday morning I sat down and did the simplest, most restor- ative thing I could imagine.
I sent my dad a question.

What were your favorite toys as a child?

What happened next changed not only him, but everyone around him, and ultimately led me to reevaluate how we all achieve meaning, balance, and joy in our lives.

This is the story of what happened next, and what we all can learn from it.

This is the story of the Life Story Project.
 
The Story of your Life  

Stop for a second and listen to the story going on in your head. It’s there, somewhere, in the background. It’s the story you tell others when you first meet them; it’s the story you tell yourself when you visit a meaningful place, when you flip through old photographs, when you celebrate an achievement, when you rush to the hospital. It’s the story of who you are, where you came from, where you dream of going in the future. It’s the high point of your life, the low point, the turning point. It’s what you believe in, what you fight for, what matters most to you. It’s the story of your life.

And that story isn’t just part of you. It is you in a fundamental way. Life is the story you tell yourself.

But how you tell that story—are you a hero, victim, lover, warrior, caretaker, believer—matters a great deal. How you adapt that story—how you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your life—matters even more.

Recently, something happened to me that made me focus on these issues: I lost control of that story bouncing around in my head. For a while, I didn’t know who I was; I didn’t know where I was going.

I was lost.

That’s when I began to realize: While storytelling has drawn signifi- cant academic and popular interest in recent years, there’s an aspect of personal storytelling that hasn’t gotten enough attention. What happens when we misplace the plot of our lives? When we get sidetracked by one of the mishaps, foul-ups, or reversals of fortune that appear with uncomfort- able frequency these days?

What happens when our fairy tales go awry?

That’s what happened to my dad that fall, to me around that time, to all of us at one time or another.

We get stuck in the woods and can’t get out.

This time, though, I decided to do something about it. I set out to learn how to get unstuck.
 
How I Became a Lifestorian  

What I did next—traveling around the country, gathering hundreds of life stories of everyday people, and then scouring those stories for themes and takeaways that could help all of us navigate the swerves in our lives—has a bit of a backstory.

I was born in Savannah, Georgia, to five generations of Southern Jews. That’s two storytelling traditions of outsiders that collided in me. I left the South and moved north for college, then left college and moved to Japan. There, in a town fifty miles and fifty years from Tokyo, I began writing letters home on crinkly airmail paper. You’re not going to believe what hap- pened to me today. When I got back home, everywhere I went, people said, “I loved your letters!”

“That’s great,” I said. “Have we met?”

Turns out my grandmother had xeroxed my letters and passed them around. They went viral the old-fashioned way. If so many people find these interesting, I should write a book, I thought. With some luck, I landed a book contract. More important, I’d found a calling. Stories were how I’d always found myself. How I put my unease and outsiderness into coherent form.

Over the next two decades, I wrote stories—books, articles, television—from six continents and seventy-five countries. I spent a year as a circus clown and another traveling with Garth Brooks. I retraced the greatest stories ever told, from Noah’s ark to the Exodus. I also got married and became the father to identical twin girls. Life was ascending.

Until I had a back-to-back-to-back set of experiences that shattered that linearity—and with it any illusion that I could control the narrative of my life.
 
First, I was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive bone cancer in my left leg. My disease was so nonlinear it was an adult-onset pediatric cancer. Frightened and face-to-face with death, I spent a brutal year enduring more than sixteen rounds of chemo and a seventeen-hour surgery to remove my femur, replace it with titanium, and relocate my fibula from my calf to my thigh. For two years I was on crutches; for a year after that I used a cane. Every step, every bite, every hug I’ve taken since has been haunted by the long tail of fear and fragility.

Then I nearly went bankrupt. The modest real estate business my father had built was gutted by the Great Recession. Three generations of dreams were dampened. I emptied my savings. At the same time, the internet decimated the world of print I had worked in for two decades. Friend after friend was...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1594206821
ISBN 13 
9781594206825
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
368
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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