HBR Guide to Designing Your Retirement

CHAPTER 7

Learn to Get Better at Transitions

by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox

There is a small, disheveled baby robin making her very first steps in my garden today. She looks a bit dazed and exhausted, her lovely yellow down all awry. I know exactly what she feels like. She looks like a lot of people I know right now. At almost every age, everyone seems to be on the cusp of a similar transition: taking their first steps into an uncertain and illegible new world.

At just shy of 57, I feel poised between two ends of the spectrum, baby bird and great-grandmother. From this middle spot, I can observe my entire family hanging, in a seemingly collective cliff ritual, on the edge of change. We are all transitioning—quasi-simultaneously and quite unexpectedly—into ...