On Transitions

A week spent choosing people over premieres revealed a collective midlife “messy middle,” where personal upheavals mirror a film industry in transition and invite curiosity over certainty.

I’m just home from eight days of what I called “Tribeca adjacent” activity: gatherings and one-on-one time with friends and collaborators both long-standing and new. Most of these people live in New York, and it’s a gift to spend time with them on their home turf. I wanted to see movies, especially premieres produced by some dear friends, but it felt important to prioritize conversation over screenings on this trip; if someone could meet and it was the same time as a movie, bye-bye movie. There will be other chances to see the films, and I will.

Early in my trip, I began to notice a trend that became so powerful that with each subsequent conversation I came to anticipate it’s appearance. I was both bowled over and not at all surprised when it arose: Big Change. People are on the verge of becoming parents, moving out of state, putting property on the market, going back to school, becoming empty-nesters, getting divorced, pausing to caretake. They are in the throes of shifts in health and wellbeing, causing redefinitions of career and new approaches to the unrelenting pace of modern work life. Others are stepping into new jobs with greater responsibilities or launching new funds. I know they say the only constant is change, but right now feels like an especially turbulent time on the personal life level.

Part of this is to be expected as most of my film crowd is forty and up. I, myself, graduated to a new age-range pop up menu response by turning fifty-five while in New York. By midlife most external cultural milestones have been met or foreclosed upon-ish: formal education, partnership, childbirth, early career. With all of that in the rearview mirror, hopefully some wisdom gained during the drive, and a growing sense of the end of the road ahead, it’s not unusual to take stock and fine tune (or blow up – they don’t call it a midlife crisis for nothing) one’s life for whatever time remains.¹

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But this week I’m wondering if there’s more to it than this. Is the seemingly unrelenting pace of change globally and nationally, as well as the dizzying disruption in the film industry, now reaching into our individual lives and shaking them up too? Six years on, are we still living the reverberations of a global pandemic on the personal level? It seems so.

Listening to these stories brought to mind a book that’s had a profound impact on me since a wise friend passed it along when my dad died. First published forty years ago, William Bridges’ Transitions is considered a classic, spurring a raft of follow-up explorations on the subject since. I was forty-two when I first read it, and by then I’d lived through many big changes myself: moves, school transfers, graduations, marriage, careers, divorce – mine and my parents’. I’d moved through them unconsciously and as quickly as possible, holding my breath and keeping my head down through the deep discomfort of the unknown, praying for new stability, pronto.

Bridges distinguishes change, which is situational, from transition, which is psychological. You can have change without transition, but you can’t have transition without change. In other words, transition is not …events, but rather the inner reorientation and self-redefinition that you have to go through in order to incorporate changes into your life. Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture.

He breaks transitions into three phases: endings, the neutral zone, and beginnings. Our culture doesn’t normally associate an ending as the start of something, but even though we are all likely to view an ending as the conclusion of the situation it terminates, it is also the initiation of a process. Endings are the first, not the last, act of the play.

Endings can be chosen by us or for us, but either way are ordeals, and sometimes they challenge us so basically our sense of who we are that we believe they will be the end of us. How we handle endings now has a lot to do with how we experienced them in our past. Early life traumas, griefs, and disruptions that leave behind emotional residue can make present-day endings feel unbearable, causing us to sometimes stick around in bad situations longer than necessary to avoid the discomfort of letting go. But we have to let go of the old thing before we can pick up the new one – not just outwardly, but inwardly, where we keep our connections to people and places that act as definitions of who we are. The good news is we are not doomed to repeat our past until the end of our days, and that with intention, support, and time we can all change our relationship with this inevitability and even embrace it.

Once we’ve said goodbye to the old, we enter phase two, or the neutral zone (which I’ve come to refer to as “the messy middle”), where the real opportunity for transformation lies should we choose to accept it. It is a time when an inner reorientation and realignment are occurring, a time when we are making the all-but-imperceptible shift from one season of life to the next. For the lucky butterfly this chrysalis stage is built into its DNA; for some cultures ancient and contemporary, rituals that include solitary time in the forest or a sacred hut apart from the tribe acknowledge that a moratorium from the conventional activity of your everyday existence is a necessary step to receiving the signals and cues – if only you could decipher them! – as to what you need to become for the next stage of your life. For Americans living in a change-dependent economy and a culture that celebrates creativity and innovation we have to have enough self-awareness to identify when we’re in the neutral zone and the tools and strategies to make the most of it. Bridges shares great wisdom on that topic that would take us off track, but to me the key of the neutral zone is that we give ourselves a lot of grace while keeping the antennae up for the unexpected signposts that are pointing us to stage three: Beginning.

Real beginnings are more noticeable in hindsight than in the present moment. They don’t usually hit like a bolt of lightning, but rather are small steps that eventually lead us to our new selves. Once we’re there, we look back and think, “Geez - I hardly recognize that old me.” Lately I’ve said that my life today resembles almost nothing of my life five years ago, but I couldn’t point to a single specific moment of transformation, a clear marker of the new.² Bridges warns that in making a beginning, you can become so invested in the results that whatever you have to do to reach them looks pretty insignificant and that (i)n an important new beginning, a preoccupation with results can be damaging. His advice: Shift the attention from the intended goal to the process of investigation. I love this so much I’m going to say it again and boldface it:

Shift the attention from the intended goal to the process of investigation.

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Maybe it’s a stretch, but I wonder if this industry we call independent film is in transition as much as it is in disruption. Transitions is focused on the personal; by definition it is an internal process. But industries are made up of individuals so perhaps there’s some value in treating this time as a collective neutral zone. Feels like we’re living in a messy middle to me.

Coming out of the pandemic and for a couple years afterward, the “conversation” was all about the ending; of exactly what is debatable, but the general gist was, “things were a certain way, and they don’t feel like that way now, this is hard, will it ever come back?” After a time, that conversation felt repetitive, tired, and unproductive. But maybe it was the necessary process that a collective needed to grieve a death – of business models, expectations, resources, and even optimism. As individuals, too, we move through endings in our own way and on our own timelines.

Within the past year or two, more people have come to terms with that ending and initiated ideation and experimentation with surely more to come: new ways of moving capital to support creative work, possible community ownership of platforms, shifting business models, new studios, ecosystem builders, DIY distribution and curation, audience development & engagement experiments and documentary marketing tests just to name those that are top of mind. The goals are clear: create pathways both for artist (and team) sustainability and connect films with audiences who are excited to watch them.

Of course it’s critical to maintain a focus on the goal, but during this middle time perhaps we would also be wise to shift some attention to the process of investigation. What does that look like? I’m no expert, but a few questions might shape our thinking, like:

• How much are the new things we are designing stuck in the old ways that got us into this mess in the first place, versus truly different and better (i.e. less extractive and more cooperative)?

• How are we resourcing these initiatives, and do they have what they need to be properly implemented and evaluated for learning purposes?

• Who is invited into the room where it happens, and are we tapping into a rich and diverse set of expertise and experience in designing our collective future?

• What are we learning from this work, and how are those learnings distributed and metabolized into new forming experiments?

We won’t see the new beginning until after it’s happened, both in our own lives and in the world beyond. So during this time of personal and professional messiness, my goal is to stay as curious as possible, open to receiving signals and cues as they appear. And have as much grace for myself and others as I can muster during this liminal time, and gratitude for the new beginnings, whatever and whenever they may be.

1. Two films I EP’d on the festival circuit this year (by filmmakers of, ahem, a certain age) artfully address these themes: The Oldest Person in the World and Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird). Watch them; you won’t be sorry.

2. But I CAN point to clear endings: a 2018 divorce and 2021 emergence from COVID lockdown land.