Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

As Bruce Feiler has stated on the cover page of his book, changes are on the way and we should be ready. At that moment, he could not have imagined how foresighted his statement could be. Since the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic, we are going through transitions in our lives, both small changes like transitioning into home-office, or big hardships such as surviving through a harsh disease or bereavement of a beloved person. No matter if you are struggling with the consequences brought by the COVID-19 outbreak, or tussling with challenges related to individual life or work life, this book review will be your manual in navigating through big changes. While you may find transitions fearful and confusing, you will see that they open up invaluable doors in showing you what is significant in your life. Using some main tools will help you to seize any worry and ambiguity, and make you ready to deal with any change successfully. Chapter 1 - Telling stories saves you in hardship. Think about the life stories that you tell. What are the answers you give when everything transforms in an unprecedented and unpredicted way that is not under your control? When his normal life shattered by personal challenges, Bruce Feiler came across these transitions and questions. A unique and fatal type of bone cancer was seen on him. He was almost going through bankruptcy. What he learned made the situation worse; his father with Parkinson’s disease tried to suicide several times. Even though Feiler had an accomplished writing career, he perceived as if the administration of his life story slipped out of his hands. Just like Bruce, his father, being diagnosed with Parkinson’s, was thinking that his life was worth nothing anymore. Feiler recognized that what they were going through was a storytelling issue: their life had gone astray and they did not know how to tell the story of it. Feiler started to find the “narrative solution” as he called it and asked questions to his father. He asked about simple things such as the most special toy of his father’s childhood. If his father’s answers were enthusiastic, Feiler asked more complicated questions such as the major penitence of his father. This solution changed his father’s life - within four years he had composed an autobiography and retrieved his desire to live. This solution worked well and facilitated changes in Bruce’s life as well. However, he found out a huge problem: Since people do not know how to tell the stories of the major life changes in their lives, they do not know how to deal with them. Fiedler determined to conduct more research to back up his intuition. In the next three years, he did interviews during his trip around the United States for his “Life Story Project”. In the conclusion of the project, 225 interviews with people of different ages and histories had been performed. These people were sharing one thing: they were experiencing unpredicted transitions in their lives, and they were trying to figure out how to understand what they were going through. What follows is these people’s exceptional narratives, and you will grasp how to navigate through transitions with tales. Chapter 2 - The first thing to do is to quit the belief that our lives go straight. In which shape is your tale of life? What a weird question! Could our lives have a shape? If you think deeper, you can see that we are inclined to consider our lives going through a specified path. Often, we consider our lives to go straight. After our birth, we age and go through all the other steps in the way. We see this thought as perfectly ordinary since it is too embedded in our norms. However, this setup we have in our minds was considered very differently in previous times. Ancient cultures in Babylon and Egypt were thinking that their lives were going in circles through different periods. According to them, humans were pieces of this circle, so they were doing the identical ceremonies again and again annually. During recent ancient times, this opinion has changed. Humans, with the impact of the recognition of the Bible, began to imagine life as straight, which can be seen through the picturing of ages as a line. In the initial parts of modern times, this thought had already been solidified as people experience different phases going from juvenility to wedding to elderliness. The emergence of the manufacturing age in the 19th century caused worry in people for the concept of time. In the 1800s, people started to utilize pocket watches widely. It was the initial time that people could design their lives second by second. The idea that we have a life that goes through a line is advanced throughout time. However, we do not live through predetermined steps that we can foresee. It is normal to experience unforeseen changes, not an irregularity. Also, we cannot foresee at which time in our life these changes can occur. Think about the timespan people have children, which ranges from late adolescence to age around 40. We are into the idea of “midlife crises” however, we cannot say the exact time that it will happen. If transitions and distortions are normal, we should reconsider our concept of the shape of life and stop thinking as if it is going through a smooth line. What we should do is to find a little bit more imaginative tales. Chapter 3 - Life quakes in life undermine the basis of our presence. Think like you have recognized that you are homosexual after marrying someone from the other gender. Or think like you have discovered that the gender you are given at the time of your birth is not who you are in reality. Feiler is told lots of such changes every time during his research, as he gathered tales of change. Essentially, 52 different types of life transitions that humans involved repeatedly are specified by him. What he called “disruptors” are classified into five main concepts: physical, romantic, professional, personal, and religious. Physical disruptors can be growing fat or developing an obstinate disease. A woman described how everything disrupted with her liver failure developed suddenly during her university years. Lots of Americans are accustomed to their lives that are impacted by fear of health problems: six out of ten people endure obstinate diseases such as heart disease. Romantic disruptors may contain any types of transitions in mutual intercourses. These transitions in human lives maybe because of giving birth, or the requirement to begin taking care of an old mother or father. Another reason may be separating from one’s husband or wife and constructing a fresh family sign. This disruptor is seen very frequently. We have an old fashioned idea that most people will marry and once they marry, they will remain in the same family form. In reality, the number of marriages decreased by ⅔ since the 50s, and the majority of the houses are administered by partners that did not marry or were solo persons. It is considered normal if professional life is transformed. A physics academician, interviewed for Fiedler’s Life Story Project, quit his tenure in the pursuit of fame on YouTube with his music group, and a freelance author, to be a mortician, dropped writing. These examples are not unique occurrences. Numbers demonstrate that people stay in the same occupation for around four years. The majority work on a minimum of 12 distinct jobs until the age of 50. The other two disruptors are personal and religious. Beliefs of humans can alter, or their views can change by getting a university education. Personal transitions in identity may be triggered by changing cities or reconsidering the breed. An ordinary human being goes through 36 devastating transitions throughout their lives. One can adapt to some of them without struggle however, as we will see in the following lines, some of them will undermine the basis of our lives. Chapter 4 - Life quakes in life push us to reconsider what is valuable in our lives. The marketing director Lisa participated in a meeting a couple of minutes earlier and overheard her counterparts’ chats about her brutal penchant and acidulous creation. The following day, Lisa went to the office of her boss and left her job that was making her wretched for ages. With transitions in occupations, she worked as a mentor and then a hypnotherapist to help people heal from the hardships she went through for a long time. That meeting was a milestone in her life that urged Lisa to move. This was a life quake that is called for changes in the foundation of how she understands herself and her life. We can select to go through a life quake of our own accord by running into unfamiliarity with our decisions to transform our lives. However, in general, these are occurrences that we do not have a chance to select or have no power on. For instance, a force majeure, or assassination can undermine your life in the twinkle of an eye. You can also face a special hardship such as being fired from your job. As life quakes can be negative, they can be favorable as well. Favorable transformations such as getting a university degree or purchasing an apartment can also be so oppressive. In general, the number of life quakes humans face in their lives range from three to five. What are the factors for a life change to shake our lives while some other disruptors do not affect us much? It is not just what we experienced in the times of life quakes, it is what we perceive to have happened. Although two people have experienced same cancer, one may think of this as a life quake and changes in perspectives occur but cause no change in perspective in the other person.