Bruce Feiler, LIFE IS IN THE TRANSITIONS
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zive Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast,
[0:11]Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Thanks so much for listening to my podcast.
[0:15]If you like what you hear, please follow me on Instagram at Zive Owens,
[0:19]and also at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Thanks so much for listening and joy it.
[0:23]Today's episode was sponsored by Nest Notes, which is a company founded by a mom named Chase
[0:28]Simmering, who's in Miami, and they create print keepsakes that tell stories,
[0:33]which, as you all know, stories are like my favorite thing, whether they're family stories or
[0:37]stories of the places we call home. So shop kid stationery and papergrids and little journals
[0:42]and all the rest at this amazing company, NestNotes.com. I'm here today with Bruce Filer,
[0:48]who's the author of six consecutive New York Times best sellers, including the secret of happy
[0:53]families, walking the Bible, and cancel of debts, which is becoming a show on NBC. His upcoming book
[1:00]is called Life is in the Transitions, Mastering Change in a Non-Linear Age. He's known as one of
[1:06]America's most popular voices on contemporary life. He's the host of two prime-time series on PBS,
[1:12]and his two TED Talks have been viewed more than two million times, a native of Savannah, Georgia,
[1:17]Bruce lives in Brooklyn with his wife and twin daughters. Welcome, Bruce. Thanks so much for
[1:21]coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. My pleasure as a dad who doesn't have time to read
[1:26]books, I feel right at home. We're all the same people. I know I feel bad always calling it moms,
[1:33]it's not just for moms, it's really for anyone who's busy, anybody who care takes, but I figured,
[1:38]if I got the whole mom market, that wouldn't do too shabby. My wife and I have to say my wife and I
[1:44]have a saying that when we see somebody do something hand-handed in public and stick their foot in
[1:50]their mouth or say something obnoxious on social media, we say that person needs a wife. About half
[1:56]the time that person is a woman, but the wife is the one who says, are you kidding? Don't say that
[2:02]in public. So we'll think of moms in a gender beyond the binary way. How about that?
[2:07]I love that. Gender beyond the binary moms don't have time to read books. That's a nice ring to it.
[2:15]Anyway, I have been a fan of yours, by the way, for a very long time. I love your writing. I was
[2:21]so excited when I heard you end to come on this podcast. And so I'm really delighted to be talking
[2:25]to you today, especially about your new book, which I don't know when the episode will air,
[2:30]but as we're doing the interview, I just have to say we are in the midst of the quarantine for
[2:34]coronavirus. And so the idea that I get to talk to you about transitions when you have literally
[2:40]written the book on transitions is like a personal blessing for me. So would you mind just starting
[2:45]by telling listeners what your most recent book is about? Well, I'm happy to do that. And thank
[2:50]you for your kind words. But let me just begin by by just saying, let me just reciprocate and say
[2:56]how much of not just a fan that I am, but really what a public service you're doing for all of
[3:01]us and what a mission it is to bring writers and readers together in this world. So I just want to
[3:07]salute you and celebrate you and toast you. And thank you for doing this. And I'm I'm I can assure you,
[3:13]I'm more honored to be here than you are to have me. And as you say, I have stumbled into a kind of
[3:21]fascinating life moment where I spent the last five years not thinking about pandemics and not
[3:27]thinking about job loss and financial anxiety and a family disruption, but thinking about all of
[3:36]those and thinking about this sort of larger question of what happens when our lives get overturned
[3:41]in a big way. And just to kind of quickly go through the backstory as you asked. So I had what
[3:49]I come to think of as a kind of linear life. I grew up in in Savannah, Georgia. I went to college.
[3:55]I just doesn't happen. I moved to Japan in the middle of my third year at Yale. And I started writing
[4:02]letters home of that you're not going to believe what happened to me variety. And when I got home
[4:06]six months later, everyone said I left your letters. I was like, great. Have we met and it turned out
[4:10]that my grandmother had zeroed them and passed them around and they went viral and a kind of old
[4:14]fashion sense of the word. And I thought, well, I should write a book about this. I didn't know
[4:18]anyone who had ever written a book and it doesn't happen this way. But one thing led to another
[4:23]and I sold my first book at 24 now 30 years ago. And in my 20s, I wrote books about Japan and
[4:30]England and country music. I've spent a year as a circus clown as you know. And then in my
[4:35]30s, I went back and forth in the Middle East and wrote a series of books walk in the Bible being
[4:40]the most famous of them and may television. And this was my life. And I think of it as linear as I said
[4:45]because I stumbled early on into my living my life. I was not that successful. Then I found some
[4:51]success. I got married. I had children. But then in my 40s, I had a back-to-back set of nonlinear
[4:57]experiences. First, as you know, at 43, I was diagnosed with a rare aggressive form of bone
[5:03]cancer in my left leg. That was 2008. And at the same time, my family was hit hard by the recession.
[5:11]And then a few years later, we had kind of the biggest family tragedy of all. My father was
[5:16]suffering from Parkinson's, as you know. And he was never depressed a minute in his life,
[5:21]but Parkinson's affects your mood. And he tried to kill himself six times in 12 weeks. And
[5:28]you know, there's a lump in my throat even just telling the story. And we were dealing with
[5:31]business and medical and all the ways you were dealing with it. But I'm the story guy. And I've
[5:36]lived in this meeting person my whole life. And I kind of like running into the fire in a kind
[5:40]of way. I like seeking out pain in a certain way. And one Monday morning, I sat down and I
[5:45]did something kind of instinctual. I sent him a question about his life. Tell me about the house
[5:49]you grew up when you grew up in as a boy. And then it was tell me about the toys you played
[5:54]with. And he would answer these questions like a few paragraphs, a page, two pages. And I kept
[5:59]going. And this went on for years. Tell me about how to become an eagle scout. How'd you join the
[6:03]Navy? How'd you meet mom until this man who would never written anything longer than a memo
[6:07]back into writing an autobiography? And it was the most powerful transformation any of us had ever
[6:13]seen. And then I became obsessed with how when our lives get changed in some way that we kind of
[6:20]have to rewrite or update or retell the story of who we are. And I told the story you and I were
[6:25]talking before we began this conversation at my 30th college reunion. And that night person after
[6:30]person came up and told me a similar story. My wife had a headache and went in the hospital and
[6:34]died. My daughter tried to cut and kill herself. My boss stole money from me. I'm being super
[6:39]malpractice. And everybody was saying the same thing. Like the life I'm living is somehow not
[6:45]the life I expected. Like I'm living life out of order in some way. And I called my wife Linda.
[6:49]And I said, like I'm sitting on this story. No one has had to tell their story anymore. And I
[6:54]don't know what the solution is, but I have to figure this out. And what I did, as you know,
[6:57]is I went off and created this thing that I came to call the life story project. And over the
[7:02]span of several years, I crisscrossed the country, gathering hundreds of stories of Americans of all
[7:07]ages, all walks of life, all 50 states. There's actually a funny story about that. One day I was
[7:13]bragging to my wife. I said, I think I can get 25 states. Oh, wait at night and she walked in the room
[7:19]and she said, get off 50 or shut up and walk out the room. I was like, okay, so then I sort of
[7:25]of became very obsessed with like getting demographics and all over the country. And I ended up with
[7:29]this huge trove of stories. And then, you know, I did something that I've never done, which is I set
[7:34]down to analyze them and that sort of produced the ideas that became life is in the transitions.
[7:39]I mean, don't stop. This is great. But I've never done this, right? I had, I had all of these
[7:46]stories here, right? They were, I haven't transcribed essentially the internet, you know, we're doing
[7:50]this on the internet today. You can now get transcriptions all over the world. So I use these
[7:54]services and, and like, you know, I had 6,000 pages like my, you stack together. It was like
[8:01]came to the shoulders of my adolescent twin daughters. And I got a team of like a dozen people
[8:06]in my office here in Brooklyn and we spent a year coding these stories for 57 different variables.
[8:13]High point, low point turning point in it quickly became apparent that what we had stumbled on
[8:19]was information about the number and pace and kinds of ways our lives are upended.
[8:27]And then we sort of dug into trying to figure out are there patterns,
[8:31]themes, takeaways that we can identify that can help people navigate these big life,
[8:38]I call them earthquakes. As you know, these big life changes in a, in a, in a more systematic and
[8:42]kind of helpful way using sort of best practices that everybody else has when some of which
[8:48]they stumble on to and some of which they do intentionally ways of getting through these kinds of
[8:52]life changes. And one of your main points is that the linear life, which you said you had had
[8:57]at the beginning that many had become accustomed to, that's just not a thing anymore, that we have
[9:01]to be prepared for different, the different shapes and the different rhythms our lives will take.
[9:05]And that's part of managing the transitions is sort of anticipating them.
[9:09]Yeah. So let me, let me geek out a little bit, you know, with you, because I know you can go there
[9:14]with me and everybody listening can because this is an idea that I had never thought about.
[9:19]But once I thought about it and kind of went digging through kind of dusty library books,
[9:24]turns out to have been a conversation that people have had for centuries that we simply don't
[9:28]have anymore. And that conversation is that our lives take certain paradigmatic shapes.
[9:33]So in the ancient world, they didn't have linear time, right? So there was no clocks or anything.
[9:37]So they thought life was a cycle to every season, turn, turn, turn. In the middle ages,
[9:42]it turns out people began to see linear time gets introduced and they thought that life was a
[9:47]staircase up to middle age and then a staircase down. As you know, in the book, like there's
[9:53]in the transitions, I have all these geographic illustrations of this. And you think about this
[9:59]this is not how we.
[10:00]were raised in the 20th century.
[10:01]So that 40, you peak at whatever it is.
[10:05]We'll call it 40.
[10:06]There's no new love at 50.
[10:09]There's no new career after your children leave the house.
[10:11]There's not a you peak and then downhill
[10:13]and everybody is forced to live that.
[10:15]And essentially for the last 150 years
[10:18]since the birth of science,
[10:19]we have been told that life is a linear arrow of progress, right?
[10:23]So you've got Freud saying there are these various stages.
[10:26]You've got Piaget saying children go through stages.
[10:28]You've got Ericsson saying that these eight stages
[10:30]of moral development, the five stages of grief,
[10:32]the hero's journey, all of these things
[10:34]are very linear constructs.
[10:36]And this reaches its peak in the 70s
[10:39]with this book that our mother's all read.
[10:41]The gale she said, we're going to go through passages.
[10:44]And what passages says, it's amazing,
[10:45]it literally says the predictable crises of adult life.
[10:48]Everyone does the same thing in their 20s.
[10:50]Everyone does the same thing in their 30s.
[10:52]And everyone has a midlife crisis at 39 and a half.
[10:54]And that literally popularizes that book sells 20 million
[10:57]copies that defines this idea.
[11:00]It turns out that's all bunk.
[11:02]That this is not how we live now.
[11:05]And we've kind of known it instinctually.
[11:07]And what's going on here is it's basically
[11:08]the way we look at the world effects,
[11:10]the way we look at our lives.
[11:11]Now we know that life is chaotic and it's disruptive
[11:14]and there are changes, but we haven't updated
[11:16]how we think of our lives, okay?
[11:18]So what my data turned out to show
[11:21]in this big year of analytics that we did was,
[11:23]so the linear life is dead.
[11:25]That's the first point, as you said.
[11:26]It's been replaced by what I call the non-linear life.
[11:28]And that includes a lot more disruption.
[11:30]So my data show we have 36 disruptions around in our life.
[11:33]That's one every 12 to 18 months.
[11:36]It could be small, like a car accident, right?
[11:39]Or a major surgery, it could be a big diagnosis.
[11:43]It could be, it's having a child,
[11:45]it's having a child leave the home.
[11:46]Most of these we get through,
[11:48]we're pretty good at adjusting
[11:49]and responding to this kind of change.
[11:52]But one in 10 of them become massive life reorientations, okay?
[11:56]I call these things life quakes.
[11:58]We have three to five in the course of our lives.
[12:01]And I would say the signature finding
[12:03]from the life story project is that the average length
[12:06]of these life quakes, I feel like I'm almost should ask you,
[12:09]like if you, how many you've been through
[12:10]what they are, but you know what this is going,
[12:12]because you've read the book is five years.
[12:15]The three quarters of us that takes four years or longer.
[12:18]And you think three to five in a life, four, five, six years,
[12:20]that's 25 years, half of our adult lives.
[12:23]We are in transition in one way or the other.
[12:27]And my book unveils essentially the first new model
[12:31]for navigating life transitions in 50 years.
[12:33]There has not been a book about this since the late 70s,
[12:36]a book called Transitions.
[12:37]And it turns out we're all doing this.
[12:39]We don't have a language for it.
[12:40]That was part of my goal.
[12:42]And it turns out the book is now going to appear
[12:45]in the middle of what is a massive worldwide situation,
[12:49]life quake, what we're all going through
[12:51]one of these transitions at the same time.
[12:53]You must have planned that.
[12:54]I mean, what's interesting, there is a tiny paragraph
[12:58]in my book where we broke down the biggest transitions
[13:03]in everyone's lives on a metric,
[13:05]one of those two by two metrics.
[13:06]And the two polls were personal and collective.
[13:10]So a personal one would be death in the family
[13:13]or finding out you have a child with special needs
[13:16]or losing your job.
[13:17]Collective is an earthquake, a hurricane,
[13:20]a growing hurricane country, pandemic.
[13:23]And then the other poll was voluntary or involuntary.
[13:26]So voluntary might be getting married
[13:28]or getting divorced if you're the one
[13:29]who's choosing to get divorced, involuntary mean,
[13:32]being told that your spouse is leaving you
[13:34]or firing your job.
[13:35]Voluntary may be starting a new enterprise
[13:37]as you've done in recent years.
[13:38]And voluntary may be losing your legs in an accident.
[13:41]And we made this grid, as you know,
[13:43]to the book and the smallest category
[13:46]was involuntary collective, okay?
[13:49]So an earthquake, a hurricane, a recession,
[13:54]the biggest involuntary collective
[13:57]that came up in my conversation was 9-11.
[14:00]A lot of people choosing to reorient their lives.
[14:04]As you know, there's a story in my book.
[14:05]I interviewed this woman who's a professor at NYU
[14:08]and she presented as a man before 9-11.
[14:11]And she said, I'd rather live without my family,
[14:14]without my friends than not be true to myself.
[14:16]And that was the trigger that gave her
[14:19]the permission to go through a gender transition process.
[14:22]Lots of people, you know, moved out of town,
[14:25]rediscovered religion, changed jobs because of 9-11.
[14:29]And so I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, okay,
[14:32]involuntary, like 3% of people
[14:33]had involuntary collective transitions
[14:35]that they identified in these conversations.
[14:37]Remember, I've done 1,000 hours of interviews.
[14:39]And so I write this paragraph that says,
[14:42]had I done this in the 20th century?
[14:45]That would have been a lot higher.
[14:46]We had two world wars.
[14:47]We had the Great Depression.
[14:48]We had women's rights and civil rights and all these things.
[14:50]And I was like, okay, we clearly are in a time
[14:53]where we're kind of me oriented
[14:54]and not we are entered.
[14:55]Boom, here we are, an involuntary collective transition
[14:59]that everybody is going through at the same time,
[15:02]not just, you know, in this country,
[15:04]but around the world.
[15:04]And I actually think that that aspect of this
[15:06]is actually not been talked about a lot
[15:08]that what is it like now to actually have the connection
[15:11]of going through a transition,
[15:12]transition tend to be kind of lonely making experiences,
[15:16]because we feel like, oh, only us can go well with me
[15:19]and everybody else's life is wonderful on social media.
[15:22]And I'm suffering.
[15:23]But now we're all going through this together,
[15:25]which actually in a kind of way
[15:27]that may end up making it somewhat easier.
[15:30]I think there's gonna be a lot of really good
[15:32]life quake turning point type material
[15:34]that comes out of this even just from the couple weeks
[15:38]of isolation.
[15:39]I can already feel like things that I want to do differently
[15:42]afterwards.
[15:42]And I'm sure everybody feels the same way.
[15:45]I feel like my parenting has changed so much.
[15:47]I have four kids at home.
[15:48]And there are things I used to be so concerned about.
[15:52]I think I tried to exert control over having lots of rules
[15:56]and screen time this and blah, blah, blah, you know,
[15:58]everything had to be like in its place and bads had to be this.
[16:01]And I really wanted dinner at a certain time
[16:03]and like things had to go according to schedule.
[16:05]And I've just let all that go.
[16:07]And I, the kids just do so much more for themselves.
[16:10]And if they watch screens, fine.
[16:12]I mean, I don't know.
[16:13]It's like relaxed on the whole thing.
[16:14]And they still want to play and everything's fine.
[16:17]So I don't know.
[16:18]I just feel like I will be a different type of parent.
[16:21]I know going forward.
[16:22]I will not go back.
[16:23]And even things like what they eat.
[16:25]I don't know.
[16:26]I don't want to go on.
[16:27]But like, you know, I feel like my biggest concern
[16:30]and I was the food supply situation.
[16:31]Like I'm just so concerned that there's not gonna be able
[16:33]to, I'm not gonna have access to food.
[16:36]So now I feel very different about meal time.
[16:37]And I feel like I always will, you know.
[16:40]Anyway.
[16:41]Here's my reaction to that.
[16:42]Okay. So back to this shape thing.
[16:44]So I stumble into this idea.
[16:46]I find it electrifying that our lives
[16:48]have a kind of shape and expectation.
[16:51]And so I then ask, as you know,
[16:53]if the last question, I did these two, three hour interviews
[16:55]and the first question was,
[16:57]tell me this drive your life in 15 minutes
[16:58]and most people took an hour and that was great.
[17:00]And then I would dig, then I would do high point,
[17:02]low point, turning point.
[17:03]And then I would dig in to like how they got
[17:05]through the transitions, right?
[17:07]Tell me, there's a motion that you struggled with.
[17:09]Did you have any rituals that you did at the beginning
[17:11]of the transition, right?
[17:12]What habits did you shed?
[17:14]What new creative enterprises did you start?
[17:16]What kind of advice from friends was most helpful?
[17:18]So I kind of was collecting all of this,
[17:20]this kind of raw data and these amazing, amazing stories.
[17:24]And then the last two questions,
[17:25]which were the ones that meant the most to me were number one,
[17:28]looking back on your life in a different way,
[17:30]do you discern a central theme?
[17:31]And I have to say I was kind of shocked
[17:33]how people just jumped out of their chair to say yes.
[17:36]And so I sort of then analyzed all these, you know,
[17:38]kind of which themes were most important.
[17:40]But then the last question was what shape is your life?
[17:42]And I sort of asked it cold.
[17:44]No one kind of really knew that it was coming.
[17:46]And people's answers were in, there were everywhere,
[17:50]there were spirals and there were lines
[17:52]and there were flowers and there were boxing glides.
[17:55]I mean, it was like amazing and also like, okay,
[17:58]just like to all over the place.
[17:59]And this was the hardest thing to analyze.
[18:01]And it took months to kind of figure out and identify.
[18:05]And then finally some kind of patterns popped into view,
[18:09]like the coins fell down,
[18:10]they got it off a slot machine or something.
[18:12]And then like the seven came off
[18:13]and we finally got it and it turns out
[18:15]that people's shapes fell into three categories.
[18:18]And the first were people who said their life
[18:20]was some sort of a line and up and down line,
[18:23]a squiggly road or river, that was the lines.
[18:26]And then there was another that was a geometric shape,
[18:28]a circle, a house, a heart.
[18:30]And then the third was people who had an object.
[18:33]My wife is an object, she helps entrepreneurs
[18:35]and so hers was a light bulb,
[18:36]she helps people with their ideas and bringing them
[18:38]to life and it turns out that these three ideas
[18:41]correspond to what I have called the ABCs of meaning.
[18:45]Okay, the three pillars of what gives us identity,
[18:48]the A is agency, these are makers and doers and creators,
[18:52]B is belonging, right?
[18:53]That's the part of us that's family and friends
[18:55]and relationships and the C is a cause.
[18:59]Okay, that's a purpose, a calling,
[19:01]something that we do to give back.
[19:02]I call these your me story, your we story
[19:05]and your these stories.
[19:07]So the famous circle in my memory was a woman
[19:10]who was an anorexic and couldn't get pregnant
[19:13]and then adopted with had an accident changed
[19:16]and then with her husband had 11 adopted children
[19:20]from nine different refugee countries
[19:22]and she said the shape of her life was a dented minivan, right?
[19:25]So that's a circle at my point of view.
[19:27]But the point of going through this whole story
[19:29]is that we have these shapes,
[19:30]we all have all three shapes within us
[19:32]and what happens when we go through a life quake
[19:34]is that we tend to shape shift.
[19:37]Okay, so maybe we've lost our job,
[19:39]that's our agency, right?
[19:40]And we spend more time with our family,
[19:41]that's our belonging.
[19:42]Maybe we've been a parent and we're an empty nester now
[19:45]and we wanna do something for ourselves.
[19:46]We go from our belonging, you know,
[19:48]from our circle to our line.
[19:50]Maybe we've been giving back as a caretaker
[19:52]and maybe we're burned out
[19:53]and we want to do something else.
[19:55]So when I hear you saying you've been a rule-based mom,
[19:59]that's your agency kit.
[20:00]again, right? This is the control. These are the rules, right? You are done. And then you realize,
[20:04]okay, guess what? It turns out the belonging is more important. So it's natural in these moments
[20:11]to shape shift, to reevaluate our priorities. Maybe we've been home and like, do we want to still
[20:16]work 18 hours a day? Maybe we want to spend more time with our family. Maybe we're sick of our
[20:19]family. And we want to give back in some way. You know, we realize, you know what, we're just taking
[20:26]care of ourselves. But we have to do something for humanity. So it's natural in these times of
[20:31]transitions to kind of, I think of it as instead of Lady Justice with the two, what's the word,
[20:35]dishes? Right? There are three dishes. And when we go through transitions, we kind of re balance
[20:42]the pebbles, if you will, that we have in each dish. That's also happened to me, by the way. That's
[20:46]why I'm doing all this now is that I feel like I have to give back in some way. And I have to like
[20:51]find meaning out of the chaos. Otherwise, like, how do I survive? So, but what about you? Like,
[20:56]how has this affected you personally or has your shape been so analyzed that it refuses to shift
[21:03]anymore? I feel like it's like a meta shape inspector. I'm definitely on a line. I've written
[21:11]15 books and like, I'm a creator and that's what gives me meaning. I mean, and I think I'm
[21:16]frankly, I'm one of those lines. It turns out I think a lot of lines turned out to be this way
[21:20]who was kind of shocked to realize that there were other shapes, right? And to me, what shape
[21:25]is all that? Oh, it was an up and down line. And that was mostly graphed based on my own success.
[21:30]And it turns out when I would say to someone what shape was your life and they would say a heart,
[21:34]and I would say, I don't know, you don't understand the question. The question is, like,
[21:39]how do you see your life? Does it go up and down? And they're like, no, it doesn't go up and down.
[21:45]It's a heart. It's my relationships. And I don't care about the ups and downs because I,
[21:49]and it was so, I don't know, I don't know, humiliating is the wrong word, but it was so,
[21:54]I was so dense about the whole thing. So I would say that now that I'm aware of this,
[22:00]when I get to in my own head or to kind of definitional about looking at my life through the
[22:06]prism of my own, I don't know, accomplishment or creations or activities, then I sort of
[22:13]check myself and realize, okay, I need to make sure that I'm giving back. I'm also, I mean,
[22:18]one of the reasons that I'm somewhat prickly about the mom dad thing is I'm also an incredibly
[22:23]involved dad, as you know, and I've had this, you know, having almost died and left my young
[22:28]children. There's a big part of me that around dads and council of dads and all these things.
[22:34]So this has, but my kids are now early teenagers. And so my thing is having to pull back a little
[22:42]bit, as you said earlier, be a little bit less hands-on and let them find their own way,
[22:47]which is hard for me. So I think it's, I would say I'm tweaking all three of the shapes
[22:51]in this current disruptive lifequake that we're all in.
[22:54]I feel like you should do the dads don't have time to read books, partner, podcasts to my podcast.
[22:59]I'm ready actually. I love that.
[23:01]When that's fun, I absolutely love that.
[23:04]So in addition to expecting some shape shifting, what else in a time of collective
[23:10]transition in voluntary, should we expect what else comes from something like this?
[23:16]So let me say, first of all, to pick a knit for a second is that,
[23:19]let's go back to the voluntary in voluntary. Turns out it was about almost 50, 50,
[23:23]3% were involuntary transitions and 47% were voluntary transitions. Okay.
[23:29]And it was interesting. So I had all these, I shouldn't call them kids, these millennials,
[23:33]these young adults, these graduates and graduate students in technology who were helping me
[23:37]analyze these stories. And when the data, you know, being pinged up that 53% of the lifequakes
[23:43]people experiencing their lives are involuntary and 47 are voluntary. My reaction was, wow,
[23:51]47% of the people choose their big lifequakes, right? They choose to change religions, right?
[23:57]They choose to leave their marriages. They choose to leave a corporate job and start a non-profit,
[24:02]right? They choose to be a stay at home mom and not go back to work, whatever it might be.
[24:07]That was my reaction. I was shocked how big the voluntary number was. For the kids in my midst,
[24:12]they were shocked how big the involuntary. I can't control my life that much.
[24:17]It's like the big, huge changes in my life because of course young people have the untested
[24:23]for the large part. A lot of them grow up with addiction. I mean, one for my stories involved
[24:27]addiction in some way. So if you grow up with that, a lot of people are born into lifequakes
[24:31]for disruptive families or divorce or addiction or poverty or whatever it might be.
[24:37]But their big reaction was how much of the big events in our life that can anticipate. But the
[24:42]point is it turns out that the toolkit is the same. I thought it would have been different for
[24:46]someone making a career change and someone facing cancer as I did or somebody who's trying to get
[24:50]sober, it turns out the toolkit is much more similar. So your question was what to expect.
[24:56]So number one is going to be similar. And I would say the following, the first thing I would say
[25:00]is that there are identifiable kind of phases that people will go through. So my names for these
[25:08]phases are the longer buy or you say goodbye to the old you. This messy middle where you are
[25:15]trying to figure out what it means to be unmoored in some way. And then there's a new beginning
[25:19]where you're launching your new self. Everything written about transitions in the last 100 years
[25:24]has said these kinds of phases happen and must happen in order. Like first you must say goodbye,
[25:30]then you must go through the messy middle, then you go through that turns out to be also BS.
[25:35]We kind of, each of us has a transition superpower and a transition Kryptonite. So maybe
[25:41]you're good at saying goodbye. Like goodbye, I'm out the door and then you're going to linger for a
[25:45]longer time in the messy middle. But a lot of people are bad at saying goodbye. Like they stick around
[25:50]far too long and what they like the messy middle because that's charged and schedules and
[25:54]I guess as you're a messy middle person, right? Then you make graphs and you make lists and
[26:00]you're going to accomplish it. So that's your superpower. Have like schedules. I have everything
[26:06]is typed. Everything is beautiful. You are a master of the messy middle, but then so what's your
[26:11]Kryptonite? You're either bad at saying goodbye or you tarry in the middle too long and maybe you're
[26:18]not good at unveiling it. So my guess is you're bad at saying goodbye. That would be my hunch because
[26:22]you seem to be good at launching new things because you do a lot of new things in the last couple
[26:27]years. So some people have a transition superpower and a transition. So don't expect to be good at
[26:32]everything and don't expect to do them in order. And that's perfectly fine. My data show that
[26:36]people do amount of order. Then so then I think you get into, there are these tools that I have
[26:42]like from the turned out that kind of seven tools of navigating transitions. I'll just go through
[26:46]them quickly. We're on time to go under all of them. But one is you need to everyone's going to
[26:49]struggle. I mentioned earlier. What's the biggest emotion use? You struggle with an transition top
[26:55]three were fear. Number one, two is shame. I was fascinated by that. I mean, I'm not too sadness.
[27:02]Like grief or it's just sad. I see this with my kids. They're just sad about all the things that
[27:06]they're missing. You know, they're teenagers and they're not having the dance concert. I'm not
[27:10]having this party and they're not going to see this Broadway show with their friends for their
[27:15]birthday. Like, they're just sad a lot of the time. And then the shame, which is the shocking
[27:20]thing to me is number three. So you have to identify this emotion. I think that ritual is
[27:25]incredibly important, marking the line. I mean, I've written a lot about religion. And this
[27:30]interest in me, I was shocked by this. But people do things. They get tattoos. They jump out of
[27:34]airplanes. They burn the old things. They repaint their rooms. Well, there's something
[27:39]ritualistic that says that old thing is it's part of the saying of goodbye. So I'm having
[27:45]our time thinking about it. And that's okay. Other people have a hard time ritualized,
[27:50]the saying goodbye in some way. Then you get into the messy middle, which is where a lot of us
[27:54]are now. And that turns out to involve two massive things. One is shedding, shedding old habits,
[28:01]old clothes, maybe you put on weight, this maybe the skinny clothes, right? Or maybe you've
[28:05]exercised a lot. Or maybe it's public recognition or dying your hair married to someone for that's
[28:12]a big deal right now. Or you have to shed something. And it turns out some of those things are
[28:18]things that you like. But a lot of them are stuff that you don't like. You know, I actually,
[28:21]I mentioned to you before we started this conversation. I cleaned my little side office. And
[28:24]you know what I said, 10 years of unused computer cables that I was I would keeping around in case
[28:33]I pulled out that old device. And I wanted to get that picture off of it. And I just garbage bags,
[28:38]full of stuff I shed this weekend. And then one of the most satisfying things that I discovered
[28:43]is that people turn out to instinctually turn to incredible acts of creativity. I mean, you see it
[28:50]now with on the on social media with the baking, right? I mean, how many people in parallel
[28:54]there's a run on yeast? Like everybody is taking up. I can't get yeast. I can't get it. I was trying
[28:59]to make holler. And I could not get yeast. So I made brownies. But yeah. Okay. So that is fascinating,
[29:04]right? So people and they didn't say I'm going to be creative. But yet there's something
[29:09]ritualistic about baking. But there's also it's a creative thing. And I heard people, stories of
[29:15]people who baked people who painted toolhouses. I'll tell you a story of this guy, Zach who grew,
[29:21]it was an African American son of a crack baby who was adopted by white family in Kansas, kind of
[29:26]drifted through his life, joined the US military, ended up in Afghanistan in his first months in
[29:32]Afghanistan. His face was blown off by the Taliban. It's 31 surgeries between the tip of his
[29:37]nose and the tip of his chin, including sewing his tongue back on. And so I'm having this conversation
[29:42]with Zach. And I say, you know, so tell me what happened. And he, by the way, suicide ideation,
[29:48]thinks his life is over. His mother gives up and moves, you know, to near where he's in
[29:52]recuperation in Virginia. And he tells me that his mother tells him one day, why don't you start cooking?
[29:58]He can't taste food.
[30:00]So we can't have spicy food. So he starts to cook and he's telling me these stories. He's starting to cook.
[30:04]Okay. And he says, the girls love it, right? And he has these specialties. He can make salmon and he can
[30:10]make lamb. And then he tells me that he starts to write poetry. And then he tells me he starts to
[30:16]paint by splattering paint on the canvas. Okay. Now I'm talking to you right now. You were probably
[30:23]not that far from where Jackson Pollock splattered a lot of that paint. And so he says to me,
[30:30]like, who's that painter who does that? Well, but a college high school dropout. And I say,
[30:35]Jackson Pollock, he said, yeah, like him. Like, I used to shoot bullets at the Taliban to get my
[30:41]anxiety sound. And now I splatter paint. Like, this is an amazing story of some, and I said to him,
[30:47]if you went to your high school self and said that you were going to cook and write poetry and paint,
[30:54]what would you thought? He said, I would have thought it was stupid. But people turn to the most
[30:59]incredible acts of creativity, writing journaling. As I said, baking, painting, dancing. I've talked
[31:05]to a woman who left her job as a tenured chemistry professor in Asian American woman in Alabama,
[31:10]who then takes up ballet dancing in two twos because she'd wanted to do what she was a child. So
[31:16]people turn to creativity. And then the last thing that they do, so that's the messy middle
[31:21]shedding and creativity. And the last thing they do is they slowly unveil the new self,
[31:26]which involves essentially rewriting your life story and then beginning to tell it to other people.
[31:30]Amazing. This is so interesting and so timely and so helpful. Now that this book, this book is
[31:35]coming out whenever it comes out. What's your next big project? Have you, you must have like
[31:40]a lot of different balls in the air? I'm interested to hear. So a couple things. So first of all,
[31:45]I am working with a producer now to turn the life story project and the book, life is in the
[31:50]transitions into some sort of a television experience where we go and kind of recreated. And I would
[31:56]say I have lots of ideas for television, for books and projects. But at the heart of all of them
[32:03]is the essence of what I've been doing the last five years, which is this incredibly old
[32:07]fashion thing. I'll let go and talk to people. You do it all day. Like, tell me the story of your
[32:10]life. In there's no greater drug than looking someone to me. I am saying, tell me the story of your
[32:14]but then the difference from what, say, that's turtle did or even some of the other storytelling
[32:20]projects out there now is then this data analytics like turning the stories into data and identifying
[32:26]patterns. So like the old fashion thing coupled with this new fangled thing. So a lot of the new stuff
[32:31]that I'm kind of conjuring up in my mind involves this core experience because I would say
[32:37]one of the gam blessed things that happened in this experience was, I don't know, 90% of the
[32:42]ideas that I uncovered were things that really had not been written about in the extensive literature
[32:47]that I was reading about, about how we get through life. So I feel like it's a great way to surface
[32:52]ideas, coupled with stories. And so I'm committed to the idea of collecting life stories.
[32:57]I love it. By the way, that's like my dream just spending the day asking people about their lives.
[33:01]That's like, I can't think of nothing more interesting.
[33:05]It's a reason that we have to do debt to don't time to read books. Totally.
[33:08]I would go to my wife who has a busy job and we have teenagers and all this. And at the end of
[33:13]the night, I would, I would like one to unfurl these stories. Like you just can't believe like the
[33:18]story that I heard today of this person. It used to be a, you know, a way to premises to now helps
[33:23]people get out of transit, you know, groups. So this woman who was a big corporate executive who now
[33:28]is a hypnotist. You know, I mean, I would, the stories were amazing and she just got to the point where
[33:32]it was too much for her. So there's a kind of... Well, just call me. I'm totally, I'm totally
[33:37]interested. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? So my big advice for aspiring writers
[33:43]is to write. You know, I know, I mean, my way of thinking about this is I know a lot of aspiring
[33:48]writers who are much better at aspiring than they are writing. And so I tell a story which I've
[33:53]never told publicly in my book of when I was a freshman at Yale in the early 1980s, somehow like
[34:01]the second month, I managed to go to the art gallery and hear this talk from James Baldwin. He
[34:07]turned out to be near the end of his life and someone raised his hand and asked the question that
[34:12]you just asked me, which is do you have any advice for aspiring writers? And and let's go with
[34:17]Baldwin's answers as opposed to Flyler's answers. He said that this is kind of in some ways
[34:22]quaintly old fashion now. He said all you need to write is a table, a chair, a piece of paper,
[34:27]and a pencil. Meaning, sit your butt down, grab the pencil and start writing. So that's my
[34:33]don't worry that it has to be perfect or they have to share it. My father, when I asked him that
[34:38]first question, tell me about the house that you grew up with. When I asked him that first question,
[34:43]tell me about the house you grew up in. He couldn't move his fingers. He had Parkinson's,
[34:48]he dictated his answer to Siri and then Siri typed it out and he began to edit it. He did this
[34:55]for five years until he wrote a 52,000 word memo, more or less without using his fingers
[35:04]entirely in one and two page chunks. To me, that's my advice for aspiring writers.
[35:10]Right. Right. Even with Siri. Just just do the exercise and
[35:15]and patterns. And we know, especially in difficult, the one thing that I have forced my teenagers
[35:19]to do against their better judgment was to journal. They're not instinctually drawn to that.
[35:25]But there is a lot of evidence that doing expressive writing as it's called 20 minutes a day,
[35:30]three days in a row or whatever will actually help you navigate whatever you're going through
[35:34]more easily. So it's the one thing that I've insisted my kids to do in this time of quarantine.
[35:38]Well, first thank you so much for coming on mom's no time to read books and sharing all the
[35:44]stories of everybody you interviewed and all the tips to help us all through this. Thank you.
[35:48]It's been my pleasure. Thank you again for doing this and for opening up your home and your heart
[35:52]to people who sit alone by themselves and want to have someone listen to their stories and keep
[35:57]telling your story, everyone. Thanks. Thanks again for listening to my podcast.
[36:02]Moms don't have time to read books. If you liked this episode, please follow me on Instagram
[36:08]at zibi Owens and at moms don't have time to read books and sign up for my mailing list
[36:13]at zibi Owens.com so you can always hear about the latest things I'm up to. Thanks a lot.
[36:18]Thanks so much to nestnotes.com for sponsoring today's podcast. Check them out for some amazing
[36:23]print keepsakes that tell your family stories. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texturesound
[36:28]for the Sound Editing and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this
[36:32]fantastic intro and now trim music. Thanks for listening. You could always email me at zibi
[36:36]at zibi Owens.com.