Transitions 1

In music, transitions are the time in between events - transitioning from the first theme area to the second theme area in a Sonata-Allegro form. In life, it's more like the time immediately before and after an event - getting used to the idea of moving from your childhood home to a college dorm, then getting used to the new reality after the event (a 3-part transition: before, during and after an event). In either case, they can vary in duration and magnitude. In the mind, transitions seem to BE the events. I was looking for a good metafor and came up with earthquakes...which also have duration and magnitude. Imagine that your mind is a room (or a suite of rooms) - it has a certain organization, folders, shelves, notebooks, office supplies, a recliner... The longer your mind stays in the same state, the more solidified this organization gets (for me, the idea folder gets buried in the busy stuff and kind of disappears in the pile of things "to do") . Then there is a change, the catalyst can be an event in the real world, but it doesn't have to be - the change can be slow and stealthy, fast and violent, or anything in between and the head stuff gets thrown about. We take our time reorganizing the stuff, and many times new organization patterns emerge. Maybe new ideas that were buried underneath come to the surface. So in this way, transition is actually something that my mind needs in order to be creative. I suppose we can try to re-create the same order we had before, but what's the fun in that? Admittedly, it takes a lot of courage and effort (and TIME) to organize the stuff differently...

Seems to me that time is the essential ingredient here. And, the time needed seems to be related to the magnitude of the event (duh). If there's time to be rested, there's a better chance of courage to allow patterns to change. If there's time to think, I'm more likely to allow some room for the stuff in the head to shift around if it needs to. Unfortunately, the pace of life these modern days doesn't really allow for a lot of time...and I know there have been transitions where by simple equation of facts of life I was forced to put all of the stuff that got tossed about into black trash bags and dump them (no time to process any of it). Usually the head stuff comes back to haunt, though, if it doesn't get processed, kind of like the great heap of trash that floats around the Pacific Ocean...  

Lesson to myself here is that I need to stop beating myself up for not being able to transition faster. It's important to allow the time for the transition that it needs - if for nothing else, sanity's sake!