We can get so attached to the way things are, which can mean working really hard to protect against any dangers we imagine.

But who imagined the coronavirus pandemic and related recession rocking our worlds, followed by demonstrations for racial justice? Could you have planned for 2020’s many jolts to our before lives?

The truth is: Life is always changing. Once we accept that, we can stop white-knuckling our way through those changes and learn how to adapt.

When was your last lifequake?

Bruce Feiler wrote an article for Psychology Today this spring headlined, “How to Master Change.”  He writes about three key takeaways from his Life Story Project:

First, the linear life is dead. The once-routine idea that our lives pass through a uniform set of stages, phases, or “passages,” with predictable crises on birthdays that end in zero, is hopelessly outdated. The notion that we’ll have only one job, one relationship, one sexuality, one spirituality is dead.

Second, today we live nonlinear lives. My data show that each of us will experience three dozen disruptors in our lives — one every 12 to 18 months. Most of these we get through with relative ease, but one in 10 — or three to five in our adult life — become major “lifequakes” that lead to massive life transitions.

My signature finding is that the average length of these transitional phases is five years. That means we spend half our adult life in this unsettled state. You or someone you know is going through one now.

Look back on your life and see if you can identify the lifequakes you’ve experienced. For me, I’d count:

1. my ex-fiance breaking up with me.
2. my mom’s death.
3. graduating business school and moving to NYC.
4. midlife transformation at 40.

I seem to encounter people going through midlife crises all the time. That’s in part a function of my demographic, but I think it’s also because it’s socially acceptable to talk about being restless, bored or going in a new direction at midlife.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I felt like I needed to keep up this veneer of having it together, even when I felt lost or sad. But I believe by keeping our lifequakes quiet, we do a disservice to ourselves and to others — we aren’t being honest about how life really looks. That means others might feel pressure to pretend they have it all together, and we lose the chance to share support and insights about transformation.

Bruce Feiler writes:

The moment in my conversations that was universally the most awkward was when I asked people how long their major life transition took. Even the most well-spoken individuals stammered and stumbled and seemed reluctant to admit what turned out to be our most consistent finding: longer than they wanted.

The average, and most common, length: five years. Three-quarters said it took four years or longer. Again, multiply these figures by the number of transitions we’re likely to face—three, four, five, or more—and it’s clear that transitions are a lifetime sport that no one is teaching us how to play.

Several years ago, I blogged about how recovering from a major setback, like a divorce or losing a job, takes longer than many people expect. Elizabeth Bernstein told the Wall Street Journal that most people will take two years, maybe longer, to overcome a trauma. Feiler suggests big transformations could take much longer.

In the WSJ article that inspired me, that expectation part comes through:

Once you get over the shock that it is going to be a long process, you can relax, Dr. Gourguechon says. “You don’t have to feel pressure to be OK, because you’re not OK.”

It’s all about expectations

If we expect life to go a certain way, that we’ll achieve the socially specified milestones in order and on time and we’ll feel great satisfaction along the way, we’re almost certainly setting ourselves up for disappointment.

Life is messy.

It’s not always “You can’t leave the house without a mask and your kids don’t go to school any more” messy, but if this year has shown us anything, it’s that we never know what’s around the bend.

Have you experienced a lifequake this year?