Ep 88 “Life Is in the Transitions” Author Bruce Feiler

Midlife Mixtape

“Find an upbeat ending”: NYT bestselling author Bruce Feiler on the power of storytelling when we go through difficult times, the universal patterns of “lifequakes”, and how we can better manage change at any age.

• BruceFeiler.com
• Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age
• The Life Story Project
• Bruce’s Ted Talks

In honor of Bruce’s first concert, my mom’s birthday this week, and presenting Midlife Mixtape Podcast sponsor Amateur Music Network, I bring you my favorite JD song to belt out.

Thanks as always to M. The Heir Apparent, who provides the music behind the podcast – check him out here! ***This is a rough transcription of Episode 88 of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast. It originally aired on December 8, 2020. Transcripts are created using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and there may be errors in this transcription, but we hope that it provides helpful insight into the conversation. If you have any questions or need clarification, please email [e-mail] ***

Bruce Feiler 00:01

The proper response to a setback is a story. So, you’re going to move on, and the only question is: what story are you going to tell about it?

00:10

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

Nancy Davis Kho 00:35

Hi listeners – Just as quick reminder as you’re doing your holiday shopping this year that indie bookstores, indie music venues, and creatives of all stripes need your support in order to be around to greet us when we emerge from this pandemic. I’m inviting you to be creative in your giving this year – buy a ticket for an artist’s live stream concert, tip generously when a DJ you like does a live set on Twitch, buy some merch from a club or a singer you love. Your local bookstore probably has gifts from $3 bookmarks on up to fat coffee table books, and they’re keeping employment and tax dollars right in your neighborhood. I hope you’ll remember to shop local, shop small, and keep live music alive in your life this December!

[MUSIC]

Hey there Pop Rocks, and if you need that reference go back and listen to Episode 87 with Joanna Bloor. Nancy here and I hope you’re hanging in, keeping your masks tight, your distances social, and your sanity intact. That light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter every day, and we are going to get there.

I am really excited about today’s conversation because it’s one that I think couldn’t come at a better time for all of us. My guest today is Bruce Feiler.

Bruce Feiler is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers; the presenter of two prime-time series on PBS; and the inspiration for the drama series COUNCIL OF DADS on NBC. Bruce’s two TED Talks have been viewed more than two million times. His new book, LIFE IS IN THE TRANSITIONS: Mastering Change At Any Age, describes his journey across America, collecting hundreds of life stories, exploring how we can navigate life’s growing number of transitions to live with more meaning, purpose, and joy. It was a Top 10 New York Times bestseller. And, full disclosure, one of the life stories he collected and reference in his book was mine.

Even before the pandemic I would have said that Bruce’s book about how transitions happen and how to make the most of them was important reading for those of us in midlife. Now, given the pandemic, I think it’s required reading…speaking of books to buy for the holidays, though I don’t think you should wait until the 25^th to read this one.

So, let’s transition from my introduction, to my interview with Bruce – see what I did there?

[MUSIC]

Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Bruce Feiler. I’m so pleased you could be with us today.

Bruce 03:02

I’m so happy to be with you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. I feel like we had one long conversation where I got to drive all the questions, and this seems only fair for you to be able to ask…

Nancy 03:13

This is what you call payback, buddy, this is called payback. I’m gonna ask you the questions now. Your book Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age is so up the alley of my listeners who are in the years “between being hip and breaking one.” We’re going to talk a lot about that. But you know, the first question, Bruce, that we always ask: what was your first concert and what were the circumstances?

Bruce 03:36

I grew up in Savannah, Georgia. And I guess when you ask this question as much as you have, I guess people try to make their first concert may be representative of their larger self? Because my first concert was John Denver.

Nancy 03:52

Wait, do you know, that’s my mom’s love language! And she has pretty advanced dementia now but you can sit with mom and play a John Denver concert and you can see my mom again. That’s how you go visit her.

Bruce 04:05

This is so good because this is my life in a nutshell. When I would go on a date with someone in those years, it was the moms that loved me. Like, moms are my demo, right? So those moms were middle-aged. And so now we’re middle-aged, but it’s still…the moms are my demo, but they’re in advanced years.

I was a kind of a sappy Southern suburbanite and I feel like that’s what I mean by “you can make your first concert this metaphor for who you are.” But that was it. The Savannah Civic Center in Savannah, Georgia. But I know a lot of people who have a story like you do, which is that after a parent can no longer converse, that music is a way to communicate with them.

Nancy 04:49

Absolutely.

Now, you have had so many New York Times bestselling books, you’ve written so prolifically, but I want to make sure that our audience knows that you have been a music writer. And in 1998, you wrote a book called Dreaming Out Loud: Garth Brooks, Wynonna Judd, Wade Hayes and the Changing Face of Nashville. I want to ask you: what is the music story that might tempt you back to music writing? Because I love reading books about music.

Bruce 05:14

There’s that old line that you probably know, which is the writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

I mean, basically, the story there is that I grew up in Georgia. I went to Yale. I moved to the Northeast. And I found that I learned more about myself as a Southerner by leaving the south and going to the North. And this was the ‘80s. It was the age of discount airfare.

So, after college, I moved to Japan because I like “oh, I’ll learn about myself as an American.” And then I spent a lot of my 20s traveling around the world. I wrote books about Japan. I wrote a book about Oxford and Cambridge, sort of inside the British aristocracy. And I was at this moment where I was coming back to America and I realized that this South that I had escaped had really become the center of the world.

My original idea was actually to write a book about three formerly Southern subcultures that had become national culture. It was going to be country music, NASCAR and barbecue. And ultimately, the NASCAR and the barbecue went away, and the country music stayed and my whole thing – and this is kind of my way of answering your question – is that I tried to write a book without using music journalism vernacular. Because I wasn’t a music writer. It was like, “can I write about country music and not just do what the music writers do?” (many of whom are my close friends now,) which is reference everything in terms of other music. So, I tried to write music by referencing the rest of the world. So even if I came back to writing about music, now, I would sort of feed that conviction even more.

Nancy 06:50

I agree with you. I hate reading a music-themed book that makes me feel uninformed. You know, like, “Well, if you don’t know this arcane 60s girls then you’re probably not going to understand this.” But if you can make it inclusive and inviting like that, I love that.

The newest book, though, that we’re going to talk about today is Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age. And it describes your journey across America collecting hundreds of life stories, exploring how we can navigate the growing number of life transitions with greater purpose and skill. I want to ask you, Bruce, to take us back to the moment when you decided to write Life Is in the Transitions.

Bruce 07:26

So that moment was not a moment, actually. It was a longer process that was a bit painful both because of the life experiences behind it and because of the writing challenges in the midst of it.

To kind of go back to my story, I had what in retrospect I now think of as a linear life. I grew up, I discovered very early – I sold my first book at 24 – what I wanted to do, I spent my 20s writing these books about various corners of the world, I spent my 30s going back and forth to the Middle East writing books about religion and conflict and that whole moment and kind of the post 9/11 world, I got married, I had children. Like this was the sort of fantasy linear upward trajectory that we all imagined.

But then in my 40s, I had a back-to-back-to-back set of disruptive nonlinear, if you will, experiences.

First, I got cancer as a new dad in my early 40s, I spent a year and a half on crutches, a brutal year getting chemo in another hospital, had my leg rebuilt. That was the year of the recession and I almost went bankrupt. My family owned a lot of real estate in Georgia that all got wiped out. And then my dad, who has Parkinson’s, he tried to take his own life three times, six times, actually, in 12 weeks.

And the only thing that kind of worked and brought my dad any joy at that moment was that I started sending him a question every Monday morning for what became years. Could you tell me about the toys you played with, about the house you grew up in? How did you join the Navy? How did you meet Mom?

And the stories that he would write kind of brought him back to life in a way that was incredibly powerful, and I began to kind of understand and then later to learn and then later kind of study and research about the power of storytelling, when we go through difficult times, to help us kind of rethink and reimagine the lives that we’re in.

That was what compelled me to write a book on this topic, but then I mentioned it was difficult. I got totally stuck. I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Was it the story about my dad? Was it the story of storytelling? Was it my story? And so, I put it aside and then I had the kind of experience maybe that is familiar to the conversations that you have on a regular basis, which is that I went to a 30^th college reunion.

I was moderating a panel of prominent classmates and on the way up, a friend was driving with me and he was on top of the world. He was closing the biggest deal of his professional life, but he was also literally crying on the phone because one of his partners had a nine-month-old, and the nine-month-old one day went down for a nap the previous day and never woke up.

And so, I’m looking out at all these 250 members of my class, I have all these prominent classmates beside me, and I have their resumes. That’s what you do when you’re on a panel, right? And they were all very impressive. And I ripped them up. And I was like, you know what? Losers don’t come to their reunion. I don’t want to hear about your successes, I want to hear about your struggles.

That night, person after person came to me and said they had a similar thing: my wife went in the hospital with a headache and died; my daughter tried to take her own life; my boss is a crook. I mean, and I’m having one of those days now, I have to say because three people I know under 60 have died in the last 24 hours.

Nancy 10:41

Oh, Bruce, I’m so sorry.

Bruce 10:42

Which is one of these things, and I kind of feel like 2020 is full of these things. No one knows how to tell their story anymore.

And I called my wife and I said, “You know what? No one knows how to talk about their lives, to tell their story, who they are, what gives them purpose and meaning. And I have to figure out how to help.” And so that was the moment, if you will, but it came after a three- or four-year process. And it’s what sent me on this journey of finding people like you and saying “Tell me the story your life.” And that’s really all I knew when I set out. That’s the most important thing I want to say. All I knew was I wanted to ask people tell me the story of your life, but I had no idea what I was looking for.

Nancy 11:19

Can you describe the research process?

Bruce 11:22

The research process was, I made up this template. It was a two-hour “life story interview,” I called it.

The first question I asked everybody was “Tell me the story of your life in 15 minutes.” Most people took an hour, and that was fine because I would interrupt. It was not entirely everyone’s fault. But you know, people like to talk. And then I would do high point, low point, turning point, and by this point, I’d be talking to someone for, say, an hour and a half, and we would have identified a moment in their life that was what I came to call a lifequake, which are these kind of big turning points in our lives.

And then I would dig into it in a micro way, like, “Okay, so you went through a lifequake.” It could be voluntary. It could be involuntary, and we can get into that. But that’s what leads to these life transitions. And so, “Tell me, was this voluntary? Was this involuntary? Which phase was the hardest? What advice from friends was the most valuable? What was the biggest emotion you were struggling with? Did you have any rituals?” To the micro, miniscule, almost like minute-by-minute, emotion-by-emotion detail. So, I started with basically with people that I knew. And then I sort of asked everybody at the end of the interview, and that’s how I ended up with you, “Do you know anybody else who’s had an interesting life story?” And I just asked questions for a year. That’s all I did, and I had 1000 hours of interviews, I had 6000 pages of transcripts.

Nancy 12:45

How many people did you talk to?

Bruce 12:46

Two hundred and twenty-five. And I remember a couple of months into it, my wife walks in… my wife works with entrepreneurs around the world. And she walked in one night and I was like, “Linda, I think I can get states!” And this will tell you a lot about my marriage… She said, “Get 50 or shut up,” and she turned, and she walks out of the room.

Nancy 13:07

I hope you saluted at that point. “Yes, I will.”

Bruce 13:09

I started organically, but then I became much more intentional, you know, I wanted diversity. And I wanted different kinds of experiences and I didn’t want too many medical and I didn’t want too many divorces. And then it turned out addiction was a big thing. I mean, it was sort of both organic and intentional at the same time.

What I then did, just to move the story along, is I got a basically a team of 12 non-middle-aged people, mostly Millennials. And we spent a year coding these stories, looking for themes, looking for patterns, looking for takeaways that could help all of us in times of change. And then I spent a year writing the book. It was sort of this huge three-year process. And I’ll just say, like, I worked on this book, as you just heard this whole story, for half a decade and I was wandering around my house, muttering to myself like a middle-aged madman, “People should be talking about life transitions! Everybody’s got life transitions, why is this not in the news every day?”

And then lo and behold! This book comes out in the middle of a pandemic when everybody on the planet is going through lifequake and a life transition at the same time.

Nancy 14:12

It’s similar to my book about gratitude. We didn’t set out to write books that would pop against the background of a pandemic, but here we are.

So why do you think it’s helpful to understand how life transitions work? The book really takes those organic qualitative interviews and slices and dices and analyzes and it’s really impressive how you’re taking what is essentially storytelling and turning it into data that helps us see whether we are, for instance, motivated by Agency, Belonging, or Cause – ABCs – or whether we are more comfortable having people around us who are comforters, nudgers or, my favorite, slappers. Why do you think it’s important for people to understand their own tendencies as they go through transitions?

Bruce 14:57

Okay. So, let’s just do a lot of big things in a short amount of time. I think that the big idea that emerged from this experience was that the linear life is dead. The idea that we’re going to have one job, one home, one relationship, you know, one source of happiness, one spirituality, one sexuality for our entire lives is deader than it’s ever been. And let’s remember, in the ancient world, they think life is a cycle. Like to every season turn, turn, turn… and then in the Middle Ages, this is kind of what I discovered in this whole process, they think life is a staircase up to middle age, and then it’s downhill from there.

Nancy 15:29

I did like seeing the 50-year olds on the pedestal though in those drawings. I liked that.

Bruce 15:34

But what you said was interesting because on those pedestals – and I found these drawings – the reason you like it is because that’s the peak. But the issue is you’re not going to be 50 forever. That’s what happened in the 20th century. So that staircase is the opposite of how we were raised, which is that middle age is the bottom. That’s the Happiness Curve that you mentioned with Jon Rauch. In a way, my whole book is sort of an attack on the idea of Passages, which is the Gail Sheehy idea from the ‘70s that, you know, everyone does the same thing in their 20s. Everyone does the same thing in their 30s. Everyone has a midlife crisis between 39 and 44 and a half.

Nancy 16:15

It was very precise. It was to the month, when we’re allowed to have our midlife crisis, with some of that old research. It’s incredible.

Bruce 16:21

It’s absurd and by the way, that research was based originally – since we’re talking about people who think about midlife, which is why they’re joining you in this journey – Elliott Jaques, who had the original research back in the 50s, he didn’t talk to anybody. He only read biographies of famous men. And when asked why only men, he’s like, “Oh, well, because you know, women have menopause and it throws off the schedule.” Hello?

Nancy 16:43

We’re useless after that. Just throw us out. It’s our sell-by date.

Bruce 16:47

If you’re not going to do women because they mess up your theory, then disregard your theory! It’s the opposite of that!

And by the way, Dan Levinson at Yale, who’s a researcher that Gail Sheehy drew on: he only talked to 40 people only at New Haven and only men, right? I was a man living in New Haven for a while and that’s fine, but New Haven is not representative of every person.

The thing about it though is how much this became truth, because this book sold 20 million copies, because all of our mothers read it. And even doing my interviews 30 years later, people would say things like, “Oh, my first midlife crisis was at 16,” or “My second midlife crisis was at 62.” And that shows you how problematic… and even the idea of middle-aged has moved. When you’re young, you think it’s 30. When you’re 70, you think it’s 60. Middle age is like middle class, everybody’s middle-aged anymore.

I think that the problem is that this idea became truth. And the big idea, back to what I learned from this process, is that the linear life is dead. It’s been replaced by what I call the nonlinear life. The thing about these constructs is how you look at the world changes how you look at your life.

In the 20th century, they looked at science, and science says everything is linear, right? Freud has certain stages of sexual development, Piaget, children’s development, the five stages of grief, the hero’s journey, these are all linear constructs. But now we know with chaos theory, with the internet, with complexity, etc., etc., the worldwide networks, that there are periods of stability and instability and that’s what our lives are like and we know that with the world. We just have to update our notion of our lives.

So just take the pandemic. If you’re between 39 and 44, you’re having a midlife crisis. But if you’re between 69 and 74, you’re also having a crisis. If you’re 27, you’re having a crisis…the point is, some people are born into a lifequake.

And so, what I discovered is that we all go through, call it three dozen disruptors in the course of our lives. Most of them we get through. But 1 in 10 becomes this lifequake and we have three to five of these in our lives and these lead to these life transitions. What I began to discover is that when people get into these periods – and yours is so vivid in my mind just chatting with you and because you’re such a good storyteller – we think we’re overwhelmed. We think no one will understand it. You know, I’ve sort of come to think that people do one of two things when they get into a lifequake, either they make a 216 item to do list and are like, “I’m going to get it through this weekend, I’m going to be the greatest of all time,” or they lie in a fetal position on their bed.

But what happens is when you talk to enough people who go through them, as I have been doing now for years, certain patterns become clear, certain steps people take, certain tools you can use. And this is what consumed me, like, okay, first understanding why we felt this way and then trying to understand, as you said, like the micro things that people can do, learning from others.

I think of life transitions as being sort of like the internet and sex, in the sense that we want to know what everyone else is doing, but we don’t want to ask. This is sort of a manual for you in one of these periods. This is what your friends and neighbors are doing that you’re not really allowed to ask or to know, but you really want to know.

Nancy 20:13

Those are two of the things that surprised me most about the book. One was the sheer amount of time that the average person will spend in transitions. Basically, half our lives were either transitioning into or out of something. And if we’re not, the people we live with might be, so we’re living through those vicariously.

The second thing was the universal nature of the transitions. You know, just this sense that everybody around us… when you’re going through something like that, you can tend to feel so isolated. And I found it very comforting to think of people reading this book and thinking, okay. I’m not alone.

And I’ll just say the third thing – I’m a mother of young adults who are living home and having their lifequake right now. They shouldn’t be here. One should be off living in an apartment and working. The other one should be in a college dorm. They’re both at home and it was comforting to me to read the stories of people who had had car pileup after car pileup after car pileup of challenge and trouble and now, they’re fine. And they’re doing this, and then they became that, and it’s like, “oh, yeah, life is long. And they will get through this. And it will be a story they tell, and it will likely be one of the hardest things they go through.” I hope it will be, but the point is, they’ll be okay. They will get through it.

You talk about lifequakes, both personal and societal. Boy, did you time this book right.As you say, everybody walking the planet right now is experiencing lifequake.

Bruce 21:39

There’s a lot there. Let’s unpack it a little bit. I appreciate that. That’s beautiful and I think relating it to your children is an interesting thing because kind of one of the patterns frankly that I didn’t write about it a lot in the book that I’ve been thinking about even more, is that idea of non-linearity.

I was born in 1964. I’m nominally the tail end of the Baby Boom, but Xers get this idea more intuitively than Boomers. And Millennials even more than Xers. The idea that you’re going to have 12.7 jobs and 11.6 moves and you’re going to, you know, have more fluid sexuality and more fluid spirituality and, you know, your sense of meaning and happiness will evolve? That is intuitive to your 20-something children whereas those of us are over 50 plus, we’re still haunted by the ghost of linearity. It’s harder for us, what is more natural to them.

But let me just go through a couple of things that you said and give you a couple reactions. So yes, if you talk about this book landing in the summer of 2020 in the middle of the pandemic I think the reason that people had this visceral need for it, it became a top 10 New York Times bestseller, etc., is because the number one reaction is what you just said: “It just made me feel relaxed. I’m not the only one who’s been thinking and feeling this way.” And I think that it kind of normalizes what we have come to believe is abnormal. So that’s point number one.

And I think that the larger message here is that these lifequakes are what I call “autobiographical occasions”; they are fundamentally narrative events that suck the normal sense of meaning out of our lives. And we have to construct it.

The way I think about this is, the proper response to a setback is a story. You’re going to move on, and the only question is, what story are you going to tell about it? And so that’s why thinking of it as a narrative event becomes in its own way very empowering.

But to go back to the first thing you said, yes, looking at the big picture. We go through three to five of these lifequakes and often they involve as you said, a pile-up. That was the hardest thing for me to name because I kept seeing this thing. And you know, if you could see me now in my office here in Brooklyn Heights where I am talking to you from you would see a lot of books. And these are like the history of social science. And no one has really talked about this. The fact that these lifequakes kind of clump, right? Just when you lose your job, you wreck your car…

Nancy 24:19

That’s when your dog dies.

Bruce 24:21

Exactly. Just when your father dies, your dog dies, right? So just when you’re going to move, you know, your daughter is found to have an anxiety disorder.

So they tend to clump, and I think part of it is timing or kind of coincidence if you will, but I’ve come to think that a lot of it is because our change immune systems have been weakened. There’s a story in there of an editor who was the editor of Rolling Stone– speaking of music – during the UVA rape story, right?

Nancy 24:52

Yeah, the fraternity story.

Bruce 24:54

Correct. And he ultimately ends up losing his job and he’d been in a difficult loveless marriage for a long time and he was at a conference. And of course, that’s when he has the affair that blows up the marriage. And he was like, you know what? Everything is burning down. I might as well throw another log onto the fire.

Some of it is that when we are weakened, we have less tolerance and we’re more willing, in some ways, to embrace change. We go through three to five of these times, and as you said to me, in some ways the signature piece of data is this is that it takes four or five, six years to go through this. I could pull up my spreadsheet with yours and I could find out how long you told me that it took you to go through the lifequake that you and I talked about, that you went through that resulted in a work change and, you know, loss of loved ones and then a creative project, all of the kind of patterns that turned out to be so vivid. And your story is so beautiful and appears a few times in my book.

But if you do the math, three to five of these in a lifetime, they take four or five, six years. I mean, you think about it, that’s 25 years. That’s half of our adult lives we spend in transition. This book is called Life Is in the Transitions, an old William James phrase, because I’m grumpy about the language of grit and resilience, because that implies that the best way to get through these times is to sort of suffer your way through them. But if you’re suffering through half of your life, you’re missing half of your life. And this is when a lot of the growth occurs.

Nancy 26:21

This is the bit I loved, “Transitions are not going away. The key to benefiting from them is to not turn away. Don’t shield your eyes when the scary part starts. That’s when heroes are made.” I love that.

Bruce 26:32

I appreciate it.

Nancy 26:33

This is going to be so much of our lives that a book like this helps us figure out how to get through in one piece.

We’re gonna break for a second to hear from our sponsor. But when we come back, I’m going to talk with Bruce about why there’s so much power in storytelling. Then I’m going to share with all of you, including Bruce, how telling my story to Bruce changed my life.

The presenting sponsor of The Midlife Mixtape Podcast is the Amateur Music Network.

On this podcast you know that I am always trying to accentuate the positive. But sometimes I get just a little bummed out thinking about everything we’re missing out on because of the COVID pandemic. Especially at Christmastime, when there should be so much singing! It feels so strange that there are no Sing-It-Yourself-Messiahs or Caroling parties or Christmas concerts in December. This year is ending in a weirdly quiet way.

But wait – you can still sing for the holidays! Join Amateur Music Network’s SINGING SATURDAYS series this Saturday December 12th at 11 a.m. to sing some choruses from Handel’s Messiah, and next Saturday the 19th to sing seasonal carols and selections from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

Amateur Music Network is a Bay Area nonprofit that connects dedicated amateur musicians with professional mentors. And Singing Saturdays is led by the amazing Ragnar Bohlin, world-renowned director of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, which has thrilled many audiences and made many glorious recordings. Ragnar has spent the pandemic in his native Sweden. But through the magic of Amateur Music Network and Zoom he’ll be in your living room or your backyard, leading you and hundreds of other singers from around the world in an hour of focused singing to lift your spirits for the holidays.

OK, it can’t replace an in-person choir, and on Zoom nobody can hear you singing. But Ragnar’s unique ability to connect through the screen will have you feeling like you’re getting personal coaching from one of the very best. And with Amateur Music Network the focus is always on being together in a community of music-makers, even while we’re apart.

Sign up for Singing Saturdays by going to amateurmusic dot org slash workshops. That’s https://amateurmusic.org/info/workshops/. And if you don’t sing, but do play a musical instrument, check out Amateur Music Network’s other online workshops. There’s something there for everyone who loves making music.

[MUSIC]

Nancy

Bruce Feiler here with me talking about Life Is in the Transitions…the idea of the power of storytelling is such a strong theme in this book, what can listeners do to better harness the power of storytelling? Why does it help us make sense of our own lives?

Bruce 29:08

A couple of quick thoughts. Number one, a life transition is an autobiographical occasion. I mentioned this term earlier. I love this term. It was invented by an obscure sociologist in the ‘80s and then mostly forgotten and I want to revive it.

An autobiographical occasion is an occasion when you are called to tell your story. The first time you visit a doctor, a first date, maybe a long plane ride, job interview…but the truth is that any moment of change like this is an autobiographical occasion. I think two thirds of people in my conversation said that whatever life transition they went through was fundamentally a narrative event where you realize, okay, I have this event and it is sort of a new chapter, if you will, in my life and I have to figure out how to integrate that chapter in.

So that’s the first thing. Recognize that we’re going through right now, what kept you awake last night, what you’ve sat and looked out the window and wondered about your cup of coffee this morning that is not just a crisis. It’s not just a lifequake, it’s not just a transition, it’s an occasion to revisit and retell your life story. That’s point number one.

Point number two, you mentioned earlier that one of the patterns that emerged in my coding was that we have what I call the ABCs of meaning. We have three pillars that give us identity. The A is Agency. That’s what we do, make, create. For many of us, that’s our work lives or our creative lives.

The B is Belonging. That’s our relationships, our family, our neighbors, our religious community, our colleagues, people we are activists with. That’s the B, that’s belonging.

And the C is our sense of Cause. That’s a purpose, a higher calling, a way to give back. In narrative terms, I think of these three stories as your Me story, that’s your agency. Your We story, that’s your belonging. Your Thee story, that’s your calling, your cause. And we all have all three stories in us.

It turns out we rank them. I would be an ABC; so I’m Agency first. I’m a writer, incredibly family oriented and I spend less of my time on causes. I’m married to a woman, perhaps not surprisingly, who’s a CAB. She started a nonprofit. Most of her day is spent giving back to others, then she’s the founder and leader of that, so, Agency. And then relationships with her. You know, she loves all of us, but she tolerates us. But really, her inspiration is the entrepreneurs she helps around the world. So, I’m… oh, by the way, what are you?

Nancy 31:35

I think I’m probably CAB or maybe ACB. I think so.

Bruce 31:41

Right. I was gonna guess one of those for you. But here’s the thing and that’s the point: In lifequakes and life transitions, we shift. So maybe we’ve been working too hard and we lose our job. And we spend more time with our family. Maybe we’ve been a caretaker like a mom or caring for an aging relative and that period passes and we’re like, you know what? I want to do something for myself. Maybe we’ve been giving back, and we burn out. And we say that, you know, I want to just be with my family right now or whatever it might be, so we shape shift. The point, is in these crises, think of your narrative as changing. It’s an opportunity to kind of emphasize something a little different in the story that you tell about yourself.

And then the last point I’ll make in terms of just the narrativizing our lives is: find an upbeat ending. You want your story to end on a positive note, no matter how dark it is, right?

There’s two ways of telling a story. One is with a downbeat ending, like, “This was a wonderful achievement. But you know what? I didn’t get the raise that I was expecting to get.” That’s an upbeat story that has a down ending.

But even downbeat stories can have up ending. So “Oh, there was a loss. And I was very saddened by this but it’s nice to see my relatives and spend time with them, you know, at the funeral and we’ve decided to have a reunion and get together every year.” In a previous life, I wrote a book called Secrets of Happy Families and I talked a lot about reunions. And it turns out like 80% of reunions begin at funerals because people realize that they like being with one another.

So, like, there was a loss. I stayed home. It was a difficult year with a pandemic. But you know what? There was that saxophone I pulled out of the back of the closet and I renewed my love of music. Try as much as possible to find some upbeat ending in the story that you’re telling. And it will set you up for what’s going to come after the difficult time.

Nancy 33:35

And besides reading Bruce’s book, what’s really cool is you can tell your story. Bruce’s has made it really easy for you to do your own life story interview. Do you want to talk about where folks can find that?

Bruce 33:46

Yeah, well, there’s two things that I have, actually. One, in the back of Life Is in the Transitions, I have the template that I did with you and 224 other people that I did life stories on, because everybody who I did it asked for the interview. And I’m like, you know what? You’re going to invest in this book and you’re going to want to do it with somebody, so here’s the template.

But I’ve actually gone one step further, which you may or may not know, which is that on my site on Brucefeiler.com, I actually have set up a service. If you go, there’s a tic tac toe board and there’s a yellow thing in the middle in the center box. For a nominal fee, we will email a question to a loved one every Monday morning, like I did with my dad. I’ve come up with a way to automate this process so that you can do a live story project with a loved one where every Monday morning, you’ll send them a question and then at the end of the year, we’ll gather them together and publish them as a book for you.

Nancy 34:40

Here’s the part where I’m going to tell you why I think it’s important for you guys to do this life story project and to think about the questions that Bruce asked.

So yes, I was one of the 225 and I think it was previous Midlife Mixtape guest KJ Dell’Antonia who probably sent you my way.

Bruce

It was KJ!

Nancy

And honestly, I didn’t even know what we’re going to talk about, I was like, “Two hours. Sure. I don’t know, he seems great. I’ll chat with anyone.” And the methodology that you used to ask me questions, the way you were listening actively and kind of probing ever deeper into the transition that we ended up talking about… I was thinking about this, this morning. I think you and I talked in the beginning of 2018. I had lost my dad just over a year earlier and that was the lifequake that I was still recovering from and just like in your book, you know, I was kind of following the path of moving through this transition.

And as I was reading, I was thinking, oh I’m more this kind of a person, and this is a little bit more how I think about these issues.

Bruce 35:45

So you were what? I’ve just looked it up while we’re talking. You were #124, so you’re exactly halfway through.

Nancy 35:50

Do you know what shape I said my life was? Because I can’t remember?

Bruce 35:58

I just closed that out. Give me a second.

Nancy 35:59

This is one of the questions Bruce asks everyone, what shape is their life? And I bet I said linear because I don’t know if I’m creative enough to have thought differently. But people said things like…

Bruce 36:07

Spirals and zigzaggy lines. I talked to a woman who used to be a big jogger and she became anorexic. She couldn’t have children. She had an accident. And now she has 11 adopted children from eight refugee countries. And she said the shape of her life was a dented minivan. Because she’s all about gathering people to go. Okay, so here we are. You are…

Nancy 36:30

Maybe I said it was a mixtape.

Bruce 36:31

Oh interesting. Given what you just said, it says “a line converting into a circle.”

Nancy 36:40

Oh, yeah.

Bruce 36:41

That’s interesting because that’s an AB, right? That’s like on that line between… you were pivoting and building this community.

Nancy 36:49

Right. This two-hour conversation that I really didn’t go into with any expectation was incredibly clarifying for me because after I had thought through these questions and had this conversation with Bruce, it became clear to me, first of all, that I was going through a lifequake. Because, you know, the life less examined, that’s my theme song. It was just helpful to kind of have someone reflect back to me that yeah, you’re still recovering from your dad’s death.

I talked about the fact that I had just started the podcast a few months earlier. And at the very end, you said, “Are you working on anything else that’s exciting to you?” And I said, yes, kind of as a writing exercise, I’m putting together a book proposal about gratitude letters because I don’t know, maybe there’s something to it.

And you said, and I’m going to paraphrase, I apologize if I get any the numbers wrong. But you said something like, “I hear 200 ideas for books a year of which 20 have any real merit and yours is going to be one of my 20.” And I will tell you guys who are listening who are not writers that to have someone like Bruce Feiler, who’s a best-selling author, who is so prolific, tell you that your idea has legs, it was like rocket fuel. And I remember hanging up the phone and thinking, okay. Now I’m really going to work on that book proposal.

And here we are in 2020, I’ve had a book on bookshelves for a year and it’s changed my life. Your encouragement – this is where I’m going to tie it into my book about gratitude – people can do what is maybe to them a small thing, say something small and have an enormous impact on someone else’s life. I have written Bruce a thank you letter for this kind, kind encouragement that he gave me.

And just the clarity that came with thinking through my life and the transitions that I’ve overcome and how I tend to work through those things was an incredible resource to me. And I just really want to encourage you to read his book, take the survey at the end, think about the questions he’s offering. I think it’ll give you better skills for navigating them going forward.

That is my story for you, Bruce.

Bruce 38:56

Well, I’m gonna cry. I’m crying.

Let me say a couple of things. First of all, thank you. That was beautifully shared. I want to say that I believe part of it and I don’t believe part of it. I don’t believe the part that gives me as much credit as you did, but I do believe the following. That the act of storytelling, the act of a conversation like the one we had and the ones I had every day, was so transformative for everybody. Everybody had an experience and that includes to me. Like there wasn’t a moment in any conversation when somebody and other didn’t cry, or somebody or the other or both didn’t understand something. There was something about the interactivity of it. The idea of having these conversations and saying, “Tell me the story of your life, and I want to hear it,” can take two people who had no relation and give them a relationship for life. It’s incredibly powerful.

Nancy 39:50

And what a thing to have in 2020 when we’re so divided. You know, just the willingness to sit down and listen to someone else’s story… maybe it’s got to be a part of how we can try to rebuild after four years of – well, longer than that – being so very apart from one another as a country.

Bruce 40:11

And I think that we must find this way to connect. We’re craving this kind of connection. I think that, especially because the country has been divided, there’s even maybe for some time to come, and we’ve all been isolated as we have been, looking for new ways to connect.

There’s two other dimensions of that story. I just want to say how I’m hearing it today. One, and this is where I want to say that perhaps I deserve less credit than you’re giving me which is that number one, such a powerful and upcoming unexpected part of these conversations was realizing that at the bottom of people’s most difficult times, they turn to creativity. They sing, they dance…

Nancy 40:54

They start podcasts.

Bruce 40:55

Pull that saxophone from the back.

I mean, I’ll just highlight it. What was the number one cliche when the pandemic first hit? What did everybody do? They started baking bread. We sourdoughed it our way through this and I may be the person in America who was the least surprised. Because it’s like that little act of starting that podcast, of pulling out that saxophone, of painting that birdhouse…if we can fix that, then it becomes like a metaphor for how we fix the larger selves.

And I think that that is what that project did, but then I also want to highlight you mentioned earlier, I did ask all of these people tell me – and if I did your story, now we would hear this. You know, what kind of advice from a friend or loved one or a mentor or a stranger was most helpful to you? And there are some people as you said, who responded to comforters. “I love you, Nancy. Oh, you’ll get through it and that’s important.” Some people like nudgers, like, “I love you, Nancy. But you know, maybe you should try, maybe you should go to AA or maybe, you know, you should get back on LinkedIn and start looking for a job,” or whatever it might be.

And then some people – and I’m like this and it sounds like maybe you were like this – like slappers. “Okay. I love you, Nancy, but I’ve heard this story 25 times. Just start doing it or shut up.” It turns out that I was your slapper in a certain way. It was a nudging slap, but it was a clarifying thing. The reason I want to say I deserve slightly less credit is somebody else would come along in your life, I’d like to believe. Because I heard stories of strangers, of neighbors, of children, of parents, who said something similar that was clarifying for people who just needed that little push.

Nancy 42:31

Right. We’re just going to wrap up with our last question. Bruce, what one piece of advice do you have for people younger than you or do you wish you could go back and tell yourself?

Bruce 42:41

I know you well enough and I know these conversations you have. And I have to say I thought about this. And I’m saying that because I’m going to give you a little bit of a dark answer that has a light ending.

Because my first instinct was to go back to a moment when we were coding these conversations, we looked at the lifequakes. It turns out that 53% were involuntary and 47% were voluntary. An involuntary lifequake is you lose your job, you lose a loved one, you get a diagnosis, a pandemic. But a voluntary lifequake is you choose to leave a job, right? You get married. I have identical twins, like that was the lifequake. And it was joyful. It was expected, but it was also difficult, right? So that’s a voluntary lifequake. And this is just as much as about transition as losing your job might or getting cancer in my case.

So, when I have these Millennials in my office, I looked at this, I was like, “hey, man, 47% of lifequakes are voluntary! We are embracing the opportunities of the moment and this is a nonlinear age and we’re taking advantage of if!” THEY looked at this and we’re like, whoo, 53% of live quakes are involuntary? My first instinct was to say that you know what? Life is involuntary. Like, stop planning so much. Stop being so uptight. There are a bunch of things that you expect, and you don’t expect that are going to come your way, except that life is nonlinear. You won’t be haunted by the ghost like we all have been.

And I don’t want to say that, actually, because that’s the easy answer.

What I want to say goes back to something I said earlier, which is literally in the last 24 hours: I have a 60-year-old neighbor growing up who had a cousin cancer that I had, who sent me a text 90 days ago that he had read Life Is in the Transitions and it was so amazing. He was like, “I began skeptical about this idea because I thought my life was linear.” He’s been a doctor and got married, had children, “But you persuaded me and thank you for opening my mind.” He’s literally going into the grave tomorrow because of cancer that was a cousin of my cancer and maybe a cluster with my cancer.

Another, Rosemary, who’s in my book, has a bipolar daughter who just had an incident and has lost her life. And I have another friend whose older sister basically drank herself to death and has liver failure. And this is all been in the last 48 hours.

So, my advice to my younger self is think about death every day. Because if you think about dying, there is nothing more clarifying to give you perspective on your life and give you perspective on the pain you’re going through and help you reframe your story, reimagine the pain you’re going through as something you can get through, and give you a fundamental sense of meaning and purpose and joy.

Nancy 45:20

I think that’s a great piece of advice. I really do. And none of us are too young to take it.

Bruce 45:25

Think about dying every day and I guess I’ll end with this, which is that you mentioned storytelling earlier. And you read that line about “Don’t shield your eyes when the scary part starts.” And we think of our lives as a story, but we want it to be a fairy tale. There’s a hero and there’s a happy ending, but what makes it a fairy tale? What makes it a fairy tale is when the wolf shows up.

That wolf, as I said, it could be a troll, it could be an ogre, it could be a tornado, it could be a natural disaster, it could be a diagnosis, it could be a downsizing, it could be a death. And we want to shield our eyes from that.

But you can’t, because if you banish the wolf, you banish the hero. You’ve got to figure out how to get over around or under around that wolf. And that’s what makes it a fairy tale, is when we get through it. And we say, “You know what? Once upon a time.. I’m ready for the next story.”

Nancy 46:11

So well said. I’m going to encourage you guys to get a hold of Life Is in the Transitions, a lot of wisdom in there. And 2020 is one lifequake after the next. This is a book that will help you get through it.

And Bruce, I’m so grateful to you, not just for the great advice and the slap that I needed to move forward with The Thank-You Project but for being on the show today and for the work you do.

Bruce 46:32

It’s been so great to be with you. I admire that you’ve turned your lifequake into this wonderful community and I’m happy to be a part of it and even a small way.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 46:43

Did you hear what Bruce said about “finding an upbeat ending”? That’s exactly what I want to do with the last episode of the year. Episode 89 is going to be a collection of YOUR stories that answer this question:

Share one grief and one gratitude from 2020

I’ve already received so many contributions and each one is beautiful, and human, and touching. Telling your own story, about one thing you’re mourning and one thing you’re appreciating this year could be the first step towards, as Bruce says, “making your setback a story.”

So please please please send in your contributions, by Saturday December 12^th. Lots of ways to share your thoughts:

• Leave me a voice mail right from your computer! Go to MidlifeMixtape.com and you’ll see a blue button on the right-hand side that says, “Share one grief and one gratitude for 2020” Just press it, and you can start recording with one click. I would LOVE for people to do this so I can incorporate your actual voice on the episode!
• Record a voice memo into your phone and email it to [e-mail]. Again, it would be so cool to hear and share your story in your actual voice.
• Email me your grief and gratitude in 2020 to [e-mail]
• Send me a Facebook message, tweet or Instagram comment @midlifemixtape

Let’s crowd-source an episode that tells a downbeat story with an upbeat ending.

Take care, everyone, and thanks again so much for listening to the show!

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

The post Ep 88 “Life Is in the Transitions” Author Bruce Feiler appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .