When Life Doesn't Feel the Way You Thought It Would

We often think transitions begin when something changes.

A baby is born.

A wedding takes place.

We retire.

We move house.

We receive a diagnosis.

We attend a funeral.

We imagine there is a moment when one chapter ends and another begins.

I'm not sure that is true.

I think many transitions begin long before the event itself.

They begin in our imagination.

Think about a football match.

A team is losing with ten minutes to go.

The manager sends the big centre-half up front.

Everyone knows what is supposed to happen next.

The crowd imagines the equaliser.

The commentator imagines the equaliser.

The manager imagines the equaliser.

The centre-half imagines the equaliser.

For a few moments, everyone is living in a future that does not yet exist.

The transition has already happened in their minds.

Reality is simply catching up.

Life often works in much the same way.

Long before becoming a father, many men have imagined what fatherhood will feel like.

Long before retirement, people have imagined the freedom it will bring.

Long before a wedding, a funeral, a promotion or a major life change, we have often spent months or years rehearsing it in our heads.

We imagine how we will feel.

Who we will become.

What life will look like on the other side.

In many ways, we arrive before we arrive.

The difficulty is that reality rarely follows the script.

The baby arrives and along with the joy comes exhaustion.

Retirement arrives and the freedom feels less dramatic than expected.

The promotion arrives and the self-doubt comes with it.

The funeral arrives and feels different from the one we attended a hundred times in our imagination.

Not because these moments are failures.

Because reality only gets one attempt.

The imagined version has had months, years, sometimes decades, to perfect itself.

This is why transitions can feel strangely disappointing.

Not devastating.

Not wrong.

Just flatter than expected.

We assume the problem is the event.

Often the problem is the comparison.

We compare the life we are living with the life we rehearsed.

The father we became with the father we imagined becoming.

The retirement we are experiencing with the retirement we planned.

The future that arrived with the future we expected.

Reality can never win that contest.

The imagined version always had an unfair advantage.

It never had to deal with sleepless nights, uncertainty, compromises, ordinary Tuesdays or difficult decisions.

Real life does.

Perhaps this is why so many people find themselves unsettled during periods of change.

Not because the transition has gone badly.

Because they are trying to reconcile two different versions of reality.

The one they imagined.

And the one they are living.

Maybe the challenge is not reaching the transition.

Maybe the challenge is letting go of the version we rehearsed long enough to experience the one that actually arrived.

Because life is rarely found in anticipation.

It is found in participation.

Not in the story we tell ourselves beforehand.

But in the messy, imperfect, ordinary reality that follows.

The transition happened before the transition happened.

The opportunity is in noticing what arrives afterwards.