This week I’m driving my youngest of three to college. When I pull out of that parking lot, I will officially be done with the thing I always knew I wanted.
My whole life, I wanted to be a mom. Then I became one. For 25 years I have been in the chaos of running a household, raising three kids and starting and then running a business.
There hasn’t been a whole lot of time to pause. Now I’m standing on the edge of an enormous transition asking myself the same question our clients face: now what?
That question is the whole reason Silver Linings Transitions exists. We spend our days helping people move out of homes and lives they’ve known for decades, into something different. A smaller house. An independent living community. A life without a spouse in the next room. Quiet rooms that were once filled with chatter and laughter. I know the mechanics of transition better than almost anyone I know. And here I am, living one myself, and still I am fighting back tears.
What curiosity does that fear can’t
Here’s what I’ve learned, both from my clients and some of the other larger transitions I’ve faced like moving cross country from Florida to San Diego, from going through divorce, from defining my life before and after cancer.
We all will face transitions – small, large, happy, sad.
The way we approach a transition matters sometimes more than the transition itself.
You can meet a big change with dread, treating it like something being done to you. Or you can meet it with curiosity, open-mindedness, and reflection, treating it like something being revealed to you. Same event. Completely different experience. Curiosity asks, what’s actually here now that wasn’t here before? Dread asks, what did I lose? Both questions are honest. Only one of them leads anywhere good.
I’m trying to ask the first one.
If you’re facing your own version of this, whether it’s an empty nest, a retirement, a move, or the end of a chapter you didn’t ask to end, here are the two questions I keep coming back to.
What is this space going to give me that I haven’t had? Not what did I lose, what’s now open. Time, quiet, a Tuesday afternoon with nothing on it. That’s not nothing. That’s room.
And what would I put in that room that would actually bring me joy, a sense of accomplishment, or real satisfaction? Not what am I supposed to do with free time. What do I WANT to do with it. Those are very different questions.
Another reason transitions are so hard is ambiguity. We all remember Covid and the uncertainty of our life. Some people used the time to improve. Some people struggled to survive. The important thing though is that we all had the same time and though it was scary our attitude impacted how we made use of this time.
Before cancer, I didn’t hug people
I wanted to hug people but I felt awkward and afraid they’d reject me. Now most people would never guess that 21 years ago, this was a struggle. I think though I don’t remember, I might have given off “standoff-ish” vibes so I don’t recall many people reaching out their arms either.
Then I got cancer.
As I’ve shared in many blogs and even behind the name of my company, Silver Linings Transitions, facing a diagnosis gave me the pause to evaluate my life. It forced me to look at the parts of myself I’d never spent time to question, the ones I’d just accepted as fixed, and ask whether I actually wanted to keep them. And I decided, somewhere in the middle of all of it, that I wanted to be a person who hugs.
So I became one. Deliberately, the way you build any new habit that matters. Now I am a hugger. It’s one of the most ordinary-sounding changes a person can make, and it’s one of the truest examples I have of what reinvention actually looks like. It isn’t usually dramatic. It’s a decision, repeated, until it becomes who you are.
What I tell my clients, and what I’m telling myself
Nobody hires Silver Linings Transitions because they need boxes packed. They hire us because they’re standing at the edge of a life they’ve known for decades, and they don’t know how to take the next step alone. Our job, most days, is to help someone walk toward “now what” instead of away from “what was.”
Right now, that’s my own job too. I’m going to hug my youngest a little longer than usual in her dorm room. Then I’m going to head home to a quieter house, and start asking myself how I want to fill it – not with stuff but with people, activities, hobbies and passions.
As I share in my downsizing “rightsizing” presentations and coaching work, “Perfect is the enemy of done.” You don’t have to know what’s next. You just have to have the courage to take the next step.