The Happiest Place on Earth

How Tinker Bell Showed me the Way

Transitions

Sometimes a book finds you at exactly the right moment. Last week I stumbled on William Bridges’ 1979 classic Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, and I felt like someone just handed me a map. Bridges claims that change is external, but transition is internal. It is the psychological journey of letting go, wandering through an ambiguous neutral zone, and only then arriving at a new beginning. Crucially, every transition starts with an ending. We have to release the roles, routines, or identities we’ve outgrown, undergo a strange in-between space where nothing feels settled, and allow a realignment to take place before we can be comfortable in a new role.

A transition can be a natural part of development—coming-of-age, a midlife crisis—or it can be sparked by external events: a breakup, a move, the death of a loved one, retirement, or job loss. When I discovered William Bridges’ Transitions, I immediately recognized my own journey of leaving an 18-year career and wondering what comes next. The first hurdle, as Bridges says, was letting go of the role I had invested so much of myself in. Now I find myself in his Neutral Zone, a period of disorientation and creativity, where we are “not who we were, not yet who we will be.” Bridges advises lingering here: carve out solitude to process the shift, and experiment with new activities and identities to see what might take root.

Another practice Bridges recommends is revisiting earlier transitions: How did you navigate them, and what did you learn? I began taking inventory of my own turning points: attending three different high schools, leaving home for college, transferring to McGill, joining the Peace Corps, becoming a father. Each time I stepped out of a familiar role and into a new one. None were effortless. Every change held the promise of a fresh start yet was weighed down by old habits of mind and behavior. In hindsight, I wish I had approached those shifts more consciously and deliberately. Perhaps that struggle explains why, in adulthood, I’ve sought stability for my family and myself. Still, Bridges’ model lets me view those experiences with more sympathy, and recalling them now gives me greater confidence. I’ve been through this before. I’m an old hand at transition.

Start with the End in Mind

Reading Bridges has deepened my empathy for people in transition, and prompted me to reassess my own consulting work. As a strategy consultant I spent hours helping clients imagine the future state, yet I often felt frustrated when those carefully crafted plans never took root. Now I ask myself: How might I have approached those projects differently if I had been more conscious of the transition process?

In my standard playbook I began with the end in mind: What will success look like? Who will use the deliverable? What will change as a result? We clarified purpose, mapped threats and opportunities, perhaps ran a SWOT or a Stop-Start-Continue exercise. But one crucial question was missing: What must end—and what do you fear losing—to make this change real?

Take one example. I helped an organization reorganize an administrative office. We pinpointed misaligned roles and inefficient processes, then recommended new structures and workflows. The client applauded the plan, and yet, six months later almost nothing had changed. Staff who had readily described their dysfunctions clung to familiar roles and habits. On paper the project was a success; in practice it stalled because we never prepared people to let go of the identities and routines they knew.

Looking back, I see that I failed to guide them through the ending phase Bridges describes. Without first naming the losses, status, competence, certainty, the recommended “new beginning” had no fertile ground. Next time, I’ll start by asking leaders and staff what they believe they must release, and how we can honor that ending before we design anything new.

Becoming Nobody

Bridges’ description of the Neutral Zone echoes Buddhist teachings on impermanence and detachment. Buddhism holds that suffering arises from clinging to conditions that cannot last and that, by loosening our grip and observing non-self, we create space for empathy, creativity, and transformation. In effect, through meditation, Buddhists willingly enter a kind of Neutral Zone.

A Ram Dass riff on these teachings that helped confirm my decision to leave my job of 18 years. Around the anniversary of my father’s death I started listening to Ram Dass’s Be Here Now podcast. One morning driving to work, I heard him say “You’ve been somebody long enough. You spent the first half of your life becoming somebody. Now you can work on becoming nobody, which is really somebody.” In that instant, watching rowing shells skim across the Charles as the sun rose over the Boston skyline, I saw that letting go of my job, while painful, also meant opening myself to the freedom and opportunity of becoming somebody new.

Since then, I’ve been pondering what “becoming nobody,” really means, and what Ram Dass implied when he added that by becoming nobody, can you realize you are everybody. It was at Disney World of all places that I grasped the wisdom of these words.

I never planned on taking my family to visit “the Happiest Place on Earth.” I am cheap and curmudgeonly by nature and I could go on a long rant about infantilization and the commodification of wonder. But, when my sister-in-law a seasoned annual-pass holder, invited us to visit her in Orlando and offered to be our guide. She spared us many horrors: waiting in long lines, overpaying for bad meals, and getting lost in parking lots in the Florida heat. Still, at times, I felt like Dante getting a tour of the planes of hell with Virgil.

Determined not to be the family grouch, I took the trip as an opportunity to practice Ram Dass’s advice. I would become nobody, shedding my preconceptions and detaching from my aversions, I would accept the exorbitant prices, the humidity, the crowd, and the kitsch into my heart. I posed for photos with Darth Vader, admired the craftsmanship of It’s a Small World, and shrieked down the waterslides at Typhoon Lagoon.

By the last evening, as I dragged my 10-year old daughter through the empty Swiss Family Robinson House and looked out on the Magic Kingdom lit up under a lavender evening sky, I might even had been enjoying myself. Then came the fireworks. Hordes of tired tourists packed the Central Plaza. Lights dimmed, the music swelled, a toddler melted down behind me. It was all part of the experience. Projections danced over the Castle façade, the fireworks burst in the sky, the crowd oohed and ahh’ed. And when Tinkerbell shot across the sky lit up in neon led lights on a hidden zipline everybody gasped, including me.

Later I asked my sister-in-law why the fireworks always make her cry. “It’s hearing everyone gasp when Tinker Bell appears,” she said, “their wonder gets me every time.”

Thanks to Tinker Bell, sharing in that moment of wonder, I caught a glimpse of what Ram Dass meant when he said by becoming nobody can we become everybody.

I am not returning home a Disney fanatic. Don’t worry this will not become a Disney blog. (Or maybe it will, I am trying to remain open to the possibilities!) Whatever direction this turned, feel free to stay tuned for more musings. I hope to post once or twice a week going forward. Maybe more. We’ll see.