A journey is the trip after you’ve lost you’re luggage.—Anonymous (quoted by William Bridges)
This winter marks the official beginning of a book I have decided to write which will explain my approach to work search to the world. For weeks, I’d been trying to come up with an outline that satisfied me, but without success.
I’d been telling myself that I could get it done—scratch it off the list!—if only I had a large block of unstructured time.
A workshop in Chicago, conducted by a mentor of mine, William Bridges, would provide the perfect opportunity: rather than fly out, I booked a sleeper on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, because there is absolutely nothing like long-distance train travel for providing large blocks of unstructured time.
Not knowing where I was in a physical sense helped me to be OK with not knowing where I was inside. It gave me the chance to feel more comfortable about being in the in-between space: between writing a book, and not writing a book; between trying to script creativity, and allowing it to flow through me.
A quiet little compartment, a world away from the demands of my professional and personal life, would supply just the right conditions under which I could create.
As it turned out, I might have done better on a subway at rush hour!
On the first leg of my journey, I traveled coach out of Boston and spent the time making preliminary notes on a legal pad, dividing my career story into chapters and coming up with discussion points under each heading.
I finished and looked back over what I had done and realized I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
It was not a promising beginning. Surely it would surely go better after I got settled into my sleeper.
I connected with the Lake Shore Limited in Albany, New York, and holed up in my compartment and set about copying my notes into my computer.
Nothing happened, neither on the screen, nor in me, that generated any excitement. Instead of seeing my scribbles transform themselves into well-crafted phrases, they stubbornly refused to take shape.
By the time I got to Utica, I decided I had wasted seven hours of precious writing time, and I gave up and retreated to the dining car. I had dinner and a glass of wine, and promised myself that I would get up at dawn and really get going on this very important project.
I woke up outside Toledo, just as the darkness was beginning to fade. I spent a long time looking out the window. The bridges were gracefully hung with yellow lights whose reflections on the river below looked like long, golden bars.
I didn’t feel like facing the rambling, disconnected thoughts left over from the day before, and I once again fled to the dining car to have breakfast and watch the sun rise over Ohio.
I got off the train in Chicago without the sense of accomplishment I had so much hoped to arrive with.
I was able to spend the next two days enjoying the conference free of guilt, because I had specifically planned not to write during this phase of my trip.
But when I climbed back aboard the Lake Shore Limited for the return trip, I told myself I had to get down to business to make up for lost time.
Again I struggled. The work I had done so far looked like gibberish to me. Nevertheless, I got out the whip and forced myself to get something done, and I was much relieved when the call for the 7:30 dinner seating released me from my self-imposed bondage.
By the time I finished eating and returned to my room, I had come to the conclusion that there was absolutely no reason I had to write a book!
I woke up at 3 AM and turned on the light and started to make a list of the sorts of thing I did not want to write.
I knew I didn’t want to write a job search manual, or a textbook, or a scholarly treatise, or a self-help book, or a workbook. What was left?
I wasn’t yet ready to answer that question, but the act of putting down on paper the things I didn’t want to do brought tremendous relief. It provided me with an inner point of reference—sort of like looking at map and seeing the words, “You are not here.”
The train schedule listed a stop at Alliance, Ohio, at 2:45 AM, and a stop in Pittsburgh at 4:05. It was 3:30, and all I knew was that I was neither in Alliance, nor in Pittsburgh, but somewhere in between.
Not knowing where I was in a physical sense helped me to be OK with not knowing where I was inside. It gave me the chance to feel more comfortable about being in the in-between space: between writing a book, and not writing a book; between trying to script creativity, and allowing it to flow through me.
One of the many things I’ve learned from Bill Bridges, which I have often used with my clients, is to think of the old, familiar story of the Wizard of Oz as an allegory of Transition.
Remember the part near the beginning of the movie where Dorothy goes into her house to take shelter from the tornado, and suddenly the house is taken up inside the tornado, and then it falls out the sky and lands in Oz?
When she steps out into this strange, colorful, new land, all she can say about the experience is, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.”
Somewhere between Alliance and Pittsburgh, I fell out of my own funnel-shaped cloud and stepped from the wreckage of what I had been trying so determinedly to accomplish into an unfamiliar world. And, like Dorothy, all I knew was that I wasn’t where I thought I would be.
As I sped through the middle of nowhere in my dark sleeping compartment, squinting at my barely legible script (a bucking train is not very conducive to good penmanship) in the dim light of the tiny reading lamp above my bed, bells of recognition rang in my head: once again, I was entering into Transition.
All I had do to get through it was to give myself permission to be where I was—in the land of uncertainty and doubt. And, at the same time, to keep writing, experimenting, and learning without worrying about my destination!
When I allowed myself to enter willingly into this space of confusion—known in the Transition Model as the Neutral Zone—I was able to tap into its wealth. The words began to flow, and when I read them back they rang with an inner truth, far different from the hollow gong I had been hearing.
