P&P Live! Bruce Feiler | Life Is in the Transitions with Campbell Brown

Muscatine thanks for joining us here online where we've been able to move many of our events in response to the current pandemic and continued need for social distancing in this virtual format. You'll still be able to ask a question of the author if you'd like to do so. Just click on the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screens and in the chat column you'll find a link for purchasing this evening's featured book, Life Is in the Transitions, by Bruce Feiler. Bruce, of course, is the author of a number of popular books on contemporary life. He is known for living the experiences he writes about. He's written about studying at top British universities, spending a season as a circus clown, learning the secrets of happy families, getting six male friends to support his young twin daughters while he battled cancer, taking a ten-thousand-mile journey across deserts to witness biblical sites, and exploring the stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Moses. In fact, Life Is in the Transitions is Bruce's fifteenth book, and we're very happy to say that he's spoken about each one at Politics and Prose, so he's got an unbroken record. He's also developed a couple of his works into primetime series on PBS, and his earlier book Council of Dads inspired an NBC family drama series. This spring, for his new book, Bruce traveled around the country collecting the stories of well over 200 people who've been through major changes in their lives. Then he mined those stories for patterns and lessons. The people he ended up talking to represented all ages, many backgrounds, and various walks of life. And you're about to hear some of the patterns Bruce identified. But his major takeaway was this: how we handle transitions in our lives is what really matters. And that's because our lives don't follow straight lines anymore. They aren't carefully calibrated progressions. Instead, they tend to unfold along nonlinear, zigzag, disordered paths. So how we navigate these course disruptions—what Bruce calls life quakes—whether it's changing a job, ending a relationship, encountering a health issue—how we handle these twists and turns is key to how well we survive. Bruce's book is insightful and persuasive and offers a very helpful framework for structuring our own lives and better understanding our own stories. So be sure to check it out. Now joining Bruce in conversation this evening is Campbell Brown, who's friends with Bruce and whose own working life has had a few zigs and zags of its own. She's currently the head of global news partnerships at Facebook, but in an earlier career, Campbell worked as a TV news reporter and anchorwoman, including prominent stints at NBC where she covered the Pentagon and White House and served as co-anchor of Weekend Today, and at CNN where she hosted a series in her own name. So Bruce and Campbell, the screen is yours. Thank you so much, Brad.

Well, first of all, Campbell, thank you for doing this, my friend. And for those of you who are watching at home, I will let you in on a secret: Campbell and her extraordinary husband Dan Senor throw the best book parties in New York City. And so I wish we could... exactly. So through this, it's what you know. I feel like we're in this salon in your home and we're welcoming our friends and neighbors from around the world in this conversation. So thank you personally for doing this and taking time out of this night. And I just want to again reiterate what Brad said: this is also a kind of a personal thrill for me. This is the first time I've spoken publicly about the book. And in 1991, when I published my first book about teaching junior high school in Japan, Carla Cohen, who then owned Politics and Prose, called me—I was living in DC—invited me to do an event there. And it was a huge honor and thrill at the time, like, 'Oh wow, look at this, isn't this great institution?' And one of the iconic independent bookstores in America. So thank you, Politics and Prose, and thank you, Campbell. That book—I mean, somehow I'm mentioning Learning to Bow—makes me think I was on a plane flying from Savannah back to Japan. I was living at the time, and I brought one of the early word processing things. It was like a Toshiba with a little tiny screen. And I was on a plane, and the battery—so long ago, the battery didn't even last from Atlanta to San Francisco. And I opened it up and I just... I saw... you know what happened was, I was in Japan, I started writing letters home like, 'You're not gonna believe what happened to me.' And when I got back home to Georgia, everybody said, 'I loved your letters.' I was like, 'Great, have we met?' And it turned out that my grandmother had Xeroxed them and passed them around, and they sort of went viral—the old-school viral, right? Exactly. And so I like, you know, Campbell, as all of you know, works at Facebook now—that's the new sense of the word. And so I'm just like, you know, I should write a book about this. I was like 22 at the time. I didn't know anyone who had ever written a book. And so I bought this thing and I like opened it up—I've never told this story before—on this plane from Atlanta to San Francisco, and I start writing. And literally somehow the words that come out of my mouth are, 'I dropped my pants and felt the rush of wind against my legs.' And I was telling the story about teaching junior high school in Japan, taking off my clothes on day one with all the schoolteachers and going into this public bath. And somehow for me, you know, coming of age in the 1980s, the way to tell a story is to tell it... you tell big stories to tell a small story, and the way to tell an important idea is through kind of through my own eyes. And that's sort of always how I've tried to tell stories. And you know, fast forward many years. There were in my 20s, there were books about Japan and England. I spent a year as a circus clown, as you know. And in my 30s, I went back and forth to the Middle East and wrote about the Bible and all of Abraham and all of those books. And now that I've thought about this, I think of that as something of a linear life, right? I figured out what I wanted to do early. I had some... I did it for no money for a long time, then I had some success. Then I got married and had children, and that was like... that was the linear life that those of us who grew up in the 20th century were told to expect. And then I just got walloped by life in my 40s, with a back-to-back-to-back set of disruptive life experiences. First, as already alluded to, I got cancer at 43 as a dad of three-year-olds. Everybody knows the story now. I asked a group of friends to be a Council of Dads. That was 12 years ago this month. That was the year of the recession. My family got hit very hard and we almost went bankrupt because we had a lot of real estate that was difficult. And then my dad has Parkinson's and was never depressed a minute in his life, but was really hit hard by Parkinson's, and he tried to take his own life. And his father had also taken his life in the 80s, a month before I graduated from high school. And it felt like we were going back. So this was a crisis of every magnitude, and we were dealing with medical and business. But I'm the story guy, right? I'm the meaning maker. And I had written an article in the New York Times from my book Happy Families based on research out of a guy named Marshall Duke in Atlanta: the children who know more about their family history are better able to navigate the world around them. And this article went crazy viral in the modern sense of the word. It was the most emailed article at the New York Times for a month. And so this idea of family history was really in my head. And so kind of on a whim, I decided to send my dad a question. So on Monday morning, I wake up: 'Dad, tell us about the house you grew up in.' Now my dad, mind you, can't move his fingers at this point. He's got Parkinson's. But he thinks about it, he dictates his answer as Siri, Siri spits it out, and then he begins. And it worked. And we were all struck. Until I sent another one: 'Tell us about the toys he played with.' 'How'd you become an Eagle Scout?' 'How'd you join the Navy?' 'How'd you meet Mom?' And this man who had never written anything longer than a memo in his life, over the next seven years to where we are now, backed into writing a 52,000-word autobiography. Just today I got five emails from him about the latest changes that he's making. And it was incredibly powerful. And so I sort of thought, 'What's going on here?' And it turns out there's a whole field of narrative gerontology, narrative adolescence—your kids are coming into adolescence right now as mine are at 15—narrative medicine. The idea of storytelling was just kind of catching hold in the country. And when I told this story, everybody had the same story. Like, 'My wife had a headache, went to the hospital, died the next day.' 'Daughter tried to kill herself.' 'My brother has stage 4 colon cancer.' 'My boss is a crook.' 'I'm being sued for my practice.' And what everybody was saying, I went to a reunion and everybody had these kind of stories. And what everybody was saying in one way or another was, 'The life I'm living is not the life I expected. Somehow I'm living life out of order. I'm discombobulated. My life was upside down.' And I called my wife Linda—and we're all friends—and I said, 'Linda, I'm sick. I'm the biggest story. I don't know what it is, but no one knows how to tell their life story anymore, and I gotta do something about it.' And that was really the inspiration for what then became the Life Story Project and what became now this book, Life Is in the Transitions.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think to address the elephant in the room, yes, this book is now coming out in the middle of a life quake. And in fact, I'd go further and say it's the first collective involuntary life quake that the entire planet has gone through in a century. So obviously I didn't know that when I went into it. Like, you know, kind of once in my life, with Abraham after 9/11, I thought we were gonna go back to Abraham, and I wrote a book about that that came out a year later that kind of touched a nerve. I felt like I could have sort of seen coming that it was gonna be this battle about Jews, Christians, and Muslims. I didn't see this coming. But in a way, I sort of did understand that that's where we were. So to take a half a step back, what I did in the story was I set out to gather these life stories. And so what I did was I created a template, this life story interview template, and I started with people that I knew. Then I asked everybody, as I asked you at various times, 'Who do you know who's had an interesting life story?' I put it on social media, it kind of went viral. And a couple of months into collecting these stories, I said, 'Well, then it walks into my office'—which is right below, I'm sitting right now. And by the way, I should say this is my family room. I sort of decked it out because I was on Good Morning America yesterday, I'm on the Today Show, so we moved furniture for this. We move furniture for your people anyway. So I said to Linda, 'I think I can get 25 states.' And this is classic my wife Linda Rottenberg. She said, 'Get 50 or shut up.' And she turned and walked out the room. So I became this quest. Like Delaware, like getting my 50th state. But I ended up with 225 life stories, all ages, all walks of life, all 50 states in this country. And at the end of it, I had people who lost limbs, lost homes, changed careers, changed genders, got out of cold, got sober, got out of bad marriages. The most astonishing range of stories. At the end, I had a thousand hours of interviews and 6,000 pages of transcript. It came like to the shoulders of my daughters, even inside, who are adolescents. And now what am I going to do? So now I have this massive trove. And for the first time in many years of writing books, I assembled this team of people, as you know, computer scientists, poets, undergraduates, graduates, people out in the world. And we spent a year coding these stories for 57 different variables: high points, low points, turning points. And the big idea that emerged from all this is number one: the linear life is dead. Okay, so the idea that we're gonna have one job, one home, one spirituality, one sexuality, one source of happiness from childhood to assisted living—that's deader than it's ever been. Imagine that's how we were raised, but it's gone. And it's been replaced by what I am calling in this book the nonlinear life. And the essence of this is, to your question, the change is quickening. It's happening faster. And so my data show that we go through one disrupter—and I'm using the word disrupter because it's neutral, because some of them are positive and some of them are negative—right, one every 12 to 18 months. I've got some more often than most people see a dentist, right? So it could be a car wreck, it could be... I've lost my video.

Well, the people—and I know a number of you are joining us tonight—we do want to hear from you. And so let me just kind of finish the point I was making. Apologies, this is new. So we go through one disrupter every 12 to 18 months, and most of us get through. You know, we might have an accident, a new job, getting married, having a baby, and we get through and we move on. And that's great. But one in ten of those becomes what I call the life quake. It's a massive change. And I use this term life quake because it's higher on the Richter scale of consequences, and also because the aftershocks can last for years. And the key thing about these is that they take a while to get through. The average length of time is five years. And you think, three to five times in our lives, the average length of time we get through them is four, five, six years. That's half our adult lives that we're going through life transitions. And what Life Is in the Transitions does is offer the first new model for how to navigate these life transitions in 50 years. And so this is what I've been sitting on for all these years. And then suddenly, here we go into this massive life quake. And we'll get into that. So to talk about some of the people, it was extraordinary. Somebody asked me recently what was my favorite story in the book, and it was a challenging thing to answer. Because I think of Rocky Lynn, who was literally a foundling who was born and put into a dumpster in North Carolina, and then went into the Army at Fort Bragg, became a paratrooper, and then always wanted to play guitar, and then became a country music singer and kind of reached the top of the charts. I'm thinking of Lisa Luder Vici, who was born in Pittsburgh into a broken family. She had three migraines a week from age three to her mid-40s. She was homeless for a while. She became a high-powered ad executive, an internet ad executive. And tuned in to a conference call one day and her colleagues were complaining how sour she was. She walked home, combed through her max bills, walked in the next day, quit on the spot. Two days later, she cut all of her cable bills and reduced her expenses. Two days later, she was watching television, so she would become a life coach. Joined life coach school. And on the third day, the teacher says, 'Why is your head on the table?' And she says, 'Because I haven't got a migraine.' And she said, 'Come with me.' The woman hypnotized her. She's never had a migraine since. And today she's the most popular medical hypnotist in the world. I'm thinking of Brian Wackett, who was a theoretical physicist, the only person in his graduate school to get a tenure job. He was at Harvard and MIT and Princeton at the School of Advanced International Studies where Einstein taught. But yet he had this side hustle. He was in a YouTube comedy band called Ninja Sex Party. And it starts going viral. And he, married with a child, walks away from a tenured job to devote his life to this comedy YouTube. And the next album reaches the top. Yeah, yeah. It's... and everybody in their 30s loves the story. No one in their 30s has ever heard of it. It's like... but I have to say, I think that maybe my favorite story, the opening chapter as you know, Campbell, has kind of back-to-back-to-back four of these iconic stories. It's David Parsons, who was an opera singer, literally married to Miss America, and had this incredibly successful clear career. But had a secret, which was he was a stone-cold drunk. And when he lost his brother to AIDS, he decided to go sober. Lost his wife. Was called to ministry. And is now an inner-city pastor in New York City. Avon Goodwin grew up in the inner city of Pittsburgh, joined the army, and drove over an IED. And some people said, 'You'll never read again.' He enrolled in school, and his childhood love was botany. And he now manages a farm in North Carolina. And Ann Raymer, who I think is joining us tonight, had this incredible story. She had a rare adult-onset childhood cancer called osteosarcoma, and had not one but two children with a rare genetic disorder, and they both had multiple cancers, including the cancer that I had, which only 600 people a year get. But I think that maybe my favorite story actually comes from my hometown. I almost didn't want to include it, but I did because I thought people would think it was a friend of mine. I didn't know her. Her name is Christie Moore. Hated school, hated reading, hated education. She could pretend to throw up in kindergarten so she'd have to go to school. And literally did everything to avoid doing her homework, including hanging out at the beach. So she skipped work for her junior year with her boyfriend and she got pregnant. So she drops out of school. Her boyfriend, to his credit, stayed with them. He dropped out of college. Six weeks later they were married. He got a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken. She took a paper route. They had to change churches in Georgia because they were shunned by the Baptist Church. And they had three children in the next six years. And they kind of were... she said, 'We were just one paycheck away from crumbling into debt.' And then her husband got sick and they had no health insurance. And it was a crisis. And one day she goes to the public library. She's pregnant at the time with child number three, I think it was. The kid goes off to toddler time. She reaches over, she pulls off... it's a great story. I mean, there's a bookstore. I wasn't even thinking about. She pulls The Water Is Wide. She has to read it twice to understand what's going on. She puts it back. The next week she... and over the next two years, she reads Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, To Kill a Mockingbird, which she reads every year. And she decides that this is her answer. She's gonna go to school. She drives back and she enrolls in college. And she's like, between classes she would sit in her car and weep because she was so... like everybody else is nodding, like, 'I don't know what's going on.' But she got through it. She would make flashcards. She'd be studying at ballet practice and at baseball practice. She graduates with a degree. She goes on, she gets a master's degree. And she then enrolls in a PhD program. And she walks down that aisle at the end of this PhD program. And she did the unimaginable. She goes from GED to PhD. And what does she do now? Her job is to advise adult non-traditional students that your life doesn't have to follow the traditional path. It can follow a nonlinear path. Wow.

I don't think it's in the character, actually. I was wrong about one massive thing. When I went into this, I assumed that how people get through illness would be one thing, how people get through a job change would be another, how people get through an identity change would be another. That turned out to be flat wrong. It turned out that the toolkit, the roadmap that people dealing with medical, identity, work, spiritual transformations, turned out to be the same. So the causes, like the life quake itself, could be voluntary—a voluntary life quake is you cheat on your spouse, right? Or you decide to change your job or start up, change your religion. And involuntary is your spouse cheats on you, you get fired, or you lose your limbs. It turns out 53% of the life quakes in my data were involuntary, and 47% were voluntary. I think, 'I'm a boomer, so I'm like, wow, 47% are voluntary.' I had all these Millennials at my office, and they were like, 'Wow, 53% are involuntary. I'm not prepared for that.' So I think that what's here, the trapdoor that made this kind of... I don't know, whatever for me, is I opened this trapdoor one day which was new to me. Maybe it will be familiar to people in this conversation. To me, it was shocking. And that is that how we view what I call the shape of your life has changed. The big linear life I was talking about turns out to be a historical anomaly. In the ancient world, you know, you and I are both deeply involved in religious communities. You've been involved. By the way, you went through an involuntary life quake, right? You grew up in one religion and you now are actively engaged as a family member of a different version. And you did that because you found love and you have a charming, handsome, persuasive husband. And he's worth it. I'm all for that. You went through it in the middle of your life. And in fact, by the way, they pile up. I don't know about trafficking too much into intimacy, but you had in a very short time you got married, you went through a religious change, you had two children back-to-back, and a career change. That's called in the language of my book a pileup. That's another factor here: they tend to congeal. So you went through a massive life quake, even in the time since I've known you. But anyway, so I'm gonna say our lives take a certain shape. In the ancient world, they didn't have linear time, so they thought that life is a circle, right? Follows the seasons. 'To every season, turn, turn, turn.' In the Middle Ages, as you know in my book, I have these great images in Chapter One. They think in the Middle Ages that life is a staircase up to middle age. I'll do it here. You can see this in this book that we're talking about. Life Is in the Transitions. They think life peaks at middle age, then it's straight down. This is not a small thing. There's no second love at 40. There's no starting a new enterprise at 50. There's no retiring and starting volunteering in your 60s. There's no starting to travel in your 70s. These things that we think are basic, they didn't believe. Life is straight down. And essentially, since the birth of science 150 some odd years ago, we were told life is a linear era of progress. Everything's gonna get better. It's the conveyor belt model of life. Freud's stages of development, Erikson's eight stages of moral development—this is modeled on the industrial model. The five stages of grief, the hero's journey. This reaches its peak with Gail Sheehy in the 70s, who writes Passages, that all grandmothers read. And it says everyone does the same thing in their 20s, same thing in their 30s. Everyone has a midlife crisis at 39 and a half. And this midlife crisis idea electrified the world. It's not true. And I think, not trying this new thought about this today, which is if you grew up in World War I or World War II, the Depression, you didn't believe in midlife crisis. What was going on in the late 20th century is we were removed from that. So here we are today. We are all in a massive collective involuntary life quake. If you're 40, it's a midlife crisis for you. If you're 32, you're still having a crisis. If you're 16, you're having your crisis. If you're 7, you're having a crisis. So the point is, these things happen whenever. And the shape of our lives takes off, it takes curves, it takes hearts, it takes every variety. And we have to break this expectation that we're all gonna get better and just have one midlife crisis or any crisis on a birthday that ends in zero.

Well, I think that's a super interesting question. And here's what I have to say about this. So I made this matrix, as you know: personal, collective, voluntary, involuntary. The smallest group was involuntary and collective. 9/11 came up. An involuntary collective life quake is a tornado or hurricane or recession. 9/11 came up a lot of stories. A wonderful story of this woman Naomi Clarke, who was born male-bodied, and she was working at Lego downtown, and she's like basically covered in soot on 9/11. And she has the secret that she believes that she's a woman but she's male-bodied. And she thinks her parents will turn their back on her and her friends will abandon her. And she says, 'You know, I would rather die alone and not be true to myself.' And that's an example of how an involuntary life quake can trigger a life transition. And that's really kind of where I think we are. We're all going through this together, and yet at the same time, each of us is going through it individually. And so I think that, you know, I was thinking about this lying in bed getting ready for this today, that you know, sort of the old... we're in maybe it's Politics and Prose, it's in my mind, you know, Tip O'Neill's line that all politics are local. All life quakes are local. All pandemics are local too. So while we're all going through it, people watching this tonight, a lot of people are gonna go and are gonna have to stay awake tonight, and they're gonna wonder, 'Am I doing the right thing? Have I lost somebody recently? Do I want to change careers? Do I want to spend more time with my children? Do I want to spend less time with my children? Am I trapped in a situation where there's domestic abuse? Do I want to stop drinking? Do I want to eat less?' And so everybody is like, 'Am I doing something that's meaningful, that I am put on this earth to do?' And I think that that's so... in the beginning of the pandemic, it was washing hands, right? It was, 'Are we going to be contagious? Are we going to die?' Now it's sort of like, 'Am I going to be okay? I feel stuck.' That feeling of being stuck, that's what a life quake is. But what a transition is, the life transition is the mechanism to get unstuck. So I think rule number one is that the life quake can be involuntary or voluntary, but the transition that comes out of it must be voluntary. You have to choose to make the change, to go through the steps. In effect, that's what the second half of my book does. It unveils this turns out to be what people do. And I'm gonna walk you through the process that you're gonna go through, the stages and the theses and the tools and all this kind of stuff. But you have to lean into the transition. You have to decide, 'I want to get better. I want to be in a more meaningful place. And I'm prepared to go through the steps that it will take to get there.'

So I think when you first go into this, you feel one of two things. You feel like, 'Oh my god, chaotic, out of control, I got you like if again.' Or you feel like stuck, like you know, it's a quick stand and you can't move. And people think, 'I'm alone. I'm the first person that's going through this.' Well, I had three or four of these conversations every day for a year. And look at enough of them, and certain patterns begin to appear. And so the first kind of big takeaway is that transitions have three phases. There's the long goodbye where we have to say goodbye to the old you. There's this messy middle where you shed certain habits and you begin new ones. And then there's this new beginning where you unveil your new stuff. So let's just start with the long goodbyes. I asked everybody, you know, 'What happened in this whole process?' And if anybody will chime in when we get to questions in a few minutes, I had certain questions. I'd start by saying, 'The story of your life.' And I do high point, low point. And then we'd identify a big transition. And then we would dig into it. But I kept changing my questions because I kept hearing things. And so I kept hearing about feelings. And so like one of my questions was, 'What was the number one feeling, the number one emotion that you struggled with in your transition?' The number one answer was fear. Fear of the unknown. 'Am I gonna be able to pay my bills? Am I gonna be lonely? How am I gonna get through this?' Number two, the second most popular answer, was sadness. They're mourning, they're grieving. They liked having money. They liked that old house. They liked that old body before they lost their limbs in an accident. And then the third, which surprised me actually, was shame. People were ashamed that they lost their job. They were ashamed that their child is an addict, right? Or that they have a child with special needs. And so I said, 'Well, can you get over this?' And this was one of the really kind of electrifying things, especially for someone who cares about religion as I do, is that people use rituals. They sing, they dance, they have memorial services. I talked to this woman Lisa Ray Rosenberg, who had an awful year. Her brother had a bone marrow transplant, and she had a big blowup with her mother. And she was into 52 First Dates, and she used to literally write down what she wore on every first date. So she got a second date, she wore the same clothes. And then she's like, 'I need to put this year behind me.' So she jumps out of an airplane. She has this huge fear of flights. 'I'm gonna do this kind of big statement because that's gonna help me deal with it.' And what these rituals do, they go... I talked to a guy who left a bad marriage after 30 years, came out as gay in his 50s, and he goes to a sweat lodge literally to kind of sweat away the past. And I think what people are doing is they're making a public statement to themselves and to others: 'I'm turning my back on the past, and I'm now ready for what's to come.' So that's the long goodbye. And then the messy middle really involves two things. One is people shed things. They might shed weight, they might shed a habit, they might shed... I interviewed this woman and her husband. They opened up a winery in Idaho. I can't... but I'm about to tell the story, but it's in my book. And basically, she and her husband both gave up their jobs. So they had to not only shed their attachment to money, they couldn't go out on Friday night. So she said, 'So we had to shed date night. And so we had like a little... she said, 'What are we gonna do? We have nothing during Friday night. We might as well sit around have sex.' So she's like, 'That's maybe too much information, but that's what we did.' So people have to shed something. And people tend to shed something actually unlike her, they like date night. They shed something that they don't like. I did this woman, she goes through cancer, she leaves her husband and a career job. She's like a hundred-thousand-mile-a-year person. And she said, 'I had to shed my habit of every night walking in, I was someone happy, the first thing I did was open the fridge.' And she yo-yo dieted her whole life, and she loses 60 pounds. So they shed things in order to do something that was to me one of the single most thrilling things I found, which is people turn to creativity. It's amazing. They pick up tap dancing. They pick up... I took this woman who actually kind of pronounced her conservative views. She worked at Fox News. She left, she got depressed. She said, 'Playing ukulele got me through my depression.' I did an Asian American woman who was a biologist in Alabama who retired and her marriage broke up. She took up adult ballet lessons because she had always wanted to do it. And then lo and behold, maybe this is all done before the pandemic. What did we all see on social media? What was the big cliche of the pandemic? Sourdough. People are baking. You can't find yeast. So that's why sourdough, apparently sourdough because you don't need to use... so you can go to a friend. So the point is, this act of creativity, using your hands, like you're creating something new, you begin to kind of create the world. There's a wonderful story in one of my favorite... Zach, Zach Eric, who was born black and raised by a white adoptive family. He joined the military and he had his face shot off in the Taliban. He had 31 surgeries between the tip of his nose and the tip of his chin, including having his tongue sewn back on. He was suicidal ideation, the whole thing. And he tells me the story that his mom says, 'Then you should start cooking.' So first cooking, then poetry, then painting. I'm like, 'You're painting?' He said, 'Yeah, I started splattering paint on the canvas. I used to get out my aggression by shooting the Taliban. Now I shoot paint on the canvas.' And I say, 'You're doing splatter painting.' He said, 'Yeah, you know that guy Jackson Pollock? Like him.' And I said, 'If I told your 18-year-old football-playing self in Kansas that you're going to be writing poetry and cooking and doing splatter painting, what would you say?' He said, 'I would have thought it was stupid.' But yet, this act of creativity helps create the new you. And it's an increment of the sort of most inspiring things I learn. And this is an example of like this book is full of these tools you can do starting tonight to help you through whatever transition you're struggling with right now. Wow.

First of all, I'm... thank you for sharing. And you know, this again, Campbell, our conversation, but you're saying, 'Thank you for being personal.' Why you're being personal. And this is why I think that because I just... I don't... I want to participate in this destigmatizing of mental illness, of loneliness, of depression, of just the fact that I'm struggling with a life quake. And you know, one of the reasons that I told my own story, hey, you know, in the story of my family, is to basically say we're all going through this and we shouldn't feel bad. And so thank you. I just want to address this point you made. This was a surprise for me. I was just saying in your own life, you had a life quake of a big event. I won't disabuse you of your privacy. You've also had negative life quakes in your event, as I have. And you know, we've talked about them. It bonds people as friends, and it can bond you in this process. There's a story in my book of this incredible man, John Muir II, who came to my in-laws' house and unloaded a story that was like a ten-car pileup. So I had to name this. It struggled me because they happen in multiple sequences. And I try to figure out why. And in the best, some of it's just coincidence, but a lot of it is that these life quakes are kind of like, to use a pandemic, kind of like contagions in the body. And I think that what happens is that our immune system is weakened, and therefore some more involuntary things that we might have been disruptors that we bounced through hit us harder. And then also sometimes, you know, we throw caution to the wind and we then initiate... I did a story of an incredible story of this editor of Rolling Stone who published and in some ways was the editor of what turned out to be the fake UVA rape scandal and the hoax. He lost his job. And he had been in a difficult family situation, and he kind of was like, 'You know what, this is already happening to me. I'm gonna take some steps and I'm gonna overthrow that.' And so I think that there's a pileup. But so what I want to say first of all is I'm sorry that you're going through this, but you're already getting through it. And I want to echo what I said earlier: the toolkit for dealing with one is actually in its own way not that much harder than the toolkit for many. And if you can identify your emotions... but what I want to say is I talked about these three phases: the long goodbye, the messy middle, the new beginning. In the first century of how people navigated life, talked about life quakes... I'm sorry, life transitions. We were told you had to do them in order. First you have to say goodbye, then the messy middle, that's the five stages of grief. This all turns out to be misleading. And there's a lot of researchers who've looked at this set of five stages are actually harmful if you think so. It's everybody has what I call a transition superpower and a transition kryptonite. Maybe you're good at saying goodbye. I wrote about this one in The Wall Street Journal this weekend. She's in my book. She's like, 'I under-attach to things. My mother died when I was 19, and I'm very good at saying goodbye.' Other people bogged down in the messy middle. Some people are good at the messy middle. I did the story of this management consultant, Rob Adams, who took over the Simon Pearce Glass Company in Vermont three months after the Great Recession. And sales fell by a third in the first month. And a year later, he was asked to leave. And he was like, 'It was hard for me to say goodbye. I waited too long because I like coaching, I like my colleagues. But once I got to the middle, I'm a consultant, I made lists.' And two months after, he moves the family to Africa and starts to run a non-profit. So what I would say is identify the phase that you're good at and start there. And focus on that, whatever it is. And if you slip back, it's not surprising, because this is the thing: as we've been told, not only is the life nonlinear, the transitions themselves are nonlinear. So just to get your... if you've got divorced, okay, in the old days, you could have got divorced and one of the spouses usually disappeared, and the long goodbye was quick. Well, now if you're raising children with your ex-spouse, you're always in the long goodbye, right? So even if you're remarrying, you're still... so the point is, these people do them out of order. So don't be too hard on yourself. There are actual practical things. 90% of the things in this book are things I've never been written about. And the thing about it is, you know, when I wrote about Happy Families, a book that I shouldn't do this, but you're in... Linda, my wife, said to me, 'Don't bring me any theory. I'm not bringing you any theory. I'm bringing you actual people, things that they did. It's not me saying you should do that. I'm gonna give you, as you know, dozens of examples of every point. And you're gonna find yourself in these stories. And whatever you're dealing with, you're gonna find things that are gonna make your life easier.