Understanding Change

The Anatomy of Transition

From the archive ~ Jesse and Indi 2017

Transition is the quiet architecture of being human.
It is happening in marriages and careers, in organisations and bedrooms, in the private thoughts we do not say aloud, and in the places we never learned to name as grief.

It is not a corporate function.
It is not a life hack.
It is a human inheritance.

Transition is a threshold.
It is the moment when an old identity begins to dissolve and a new one begins to form, long before you have words for it.
It is both birth and death in the same breath.
The internal rearranging that happens beneath the surface while your outer life still looks unchanged.

It is the moment in labour when the body takes over and something ancient in you rises to carry you through.
And it is the moment near death when the body softens and releases what it can no longer hold.
Transition lives in that in-between place where something is ending and something is beginning at the same time.

It is the psychological rewiring, the somatic truth, the soul-deep recognition that you cannot return to who you were.
It is where grief and growth rise together.
It is the quiet knowing that your life is rearranging itself even if you have not yet taken a single external step.

And with that as the ground, here is the heart of what I see.

I see you.

Not the version you curate for the world.
Not the part of you that performs competence or shares the shiny pieces online.
I see the person living two parallel stories.
The one that looks steady from the outside and the one that is quietly fracturing on the inside.

I see the person whose numbers are rising while the relationship at home feels thin and tentative.
The one who once loved the rhythm of their work yet now feels a quiet pull toward something more aligned with who they have become.
The one who feels guilty for wanting a different life even though the one they built looks enviable.

I see the person who lies awake because the mind refuses to rest.
The adult child tending to a parent who no longer remembers their name while still meeting the relentless needs of their own children.
The human who stops drinking because their body whispered a truth and now feels outside of the rituals that once gave belonging.
The executive who once felt certain now second-guesses every decision since the boss they trusted walked out the door.

This is transition.

From the archive, Andy and Jesse ~ 2008

It rearranges the inner architecture of your life long before anything changes on the outside.
It interrupts your patterns, exposes truths you have avoided and asks you to hold grief and growth in the same pair of hands.

Most people believe transitions begin with a dramatic decision.
They rarely do.

They begin with the subtle.
A breath you cannot quite catch.
A heaviness you cannot quite name.
A longing that surfaces without warning.
A flicker of recognition that feels like an electric current through your system.
A moment where you silently understand that you cannot keep living the way you did five minutes ago or five years ago.

Then comes the ending.
The moment something in you knows the old version of your life or identity can no longer hold you.

Then the middle.
The unspoken territory where you still show up for your responsibilities while your deeper self is reorganising without your permission.
You function but you do not feel anchored.
You laugh but it feels slightly borrowed.
You are present but you are not fully in your own skin.

And then the beginning.
Not triumphant.
Not cinematic.
A breath that feels like it belongs to you again.
A decision that aligns rather than depletes.
A truth you can finally stand inside without shrinking.

This is the landscape I walk beside every day.
In boardrooms.
In living rooms.
In conversations about marriages that are thinning and careers that are quietly suffocating.
In creative longings people are afraid to say aloud.
In the lives of humans who look collected but are living on the edge of their own becoming.

People are not resistant to change.
They are resistant to naming the transition.
Because naming it makes it real.
Naming it means acknowledging what might be lost.
And naming it means acknowledging what might be ready to be born.

This is why I call myself a cage rattler.
Not to frighten.
To remind.
To gently shake the bars so you can see the door that has been open the entire time.

So let me ask you something that requires courage and truth.

What is it that you are avoiding - an ending you fear, or the beginning you don’t yet know how to step into?

Nothing but love
VW