William Bridges wrote the first edition in 1971 and is an ex-literature teacher.
The difference between change and Transition
- change is situational (new job, move, birth, death); transition is psychological
- first are events, but latter has inner reorientation and self-redefinition
- modern society focuses on change, but if the change doesn’t “take” it won’t work
Other societies had rituals (“rites of passage”) to help individuals manage transitions at specific times.## Part 1 The Need for Change
Americans thrive on transition
- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831
- legend of Rip van Winkle
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about that in his poem “Changed”
- Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock
To feel as though everything is “up in the air,” as one so often does during times of personal transition, is endurable if it means something — if it is part of a movement toward a desired end. But if it is not related to some larger and beneficial pattern, it simply becomes distressing.
All transitions are composed of 3 phases:
- an ending: the difficult process of letting go of an old situation
- a neutral zone: suffering through the confusing nowhere in-betweenness,
- a new beginning: launching forth again in a new situation.
The idea is to view transition as a natural process of disorientation and reorientation marking the turning points in the path of growth
1. Being in Transition
Started when retired from teaching to teach a seminar called “Being in Transition”
The class had varied people, problems and backgrounds but the similarities were in the three phases above.
Ex. mother with a newborn thought she needed a tiny bit of advice advice on her child comes to “My old life has gone. How come nobody talks about that? They congratulate you on your new life, but I have to mourn the old life alone.”
Why is letting go so difficult? We identify ourselves with the circumstances of or lives. (Bob Burns story of joining army and cured of heartburn from mother’s fried food. Instead of being relief, goes to the doctor saying, “My fire went out.”)
Letting go is at best an ambiguous experience. Before you get go through nowhere to the new, you need to understand your own characteristic coping with endings.
We shall see later most of us try to start again after an ending prematurely, for our most important beginnings take place in the darkness outside our awareness. It is the ending that makes beginning possible.
One of the benefits to reviewing your experience of endings is to see how often they have cleared the ground for unexpected beginnings. But reviewing these elements in your past may also uncover the times when the endings did not provide a starting point, as well as times when you started a new journey without unpacking your baggage from the old one. Right now, at this new transition point in your life, remember some of these aborted transition points from your past.
One reason it is so difficult to asses transitions is that the impact of transition does not necessarily bear any relation to the apparent importance of the change that triggered it. the big events—divorce, death, losing a job, and other obviously painful changes—are easy to spot. But others, such as marriage, sudden success, and moving to your dream house, are forgotten because they are “good events” and therefore not supposed to lead to difficulty.
The example of the man with the promotion (figot sick, brothers death,…). The promotion had set of a tremor across the surface of his life, leading to inner reorientations that were hard for the man to put into words. The transition began at one place in his life, but its effects reached across every aspect of his world.
Categories of events that bring on transitions.
- Losses of relationships: death, friend moving away, marital separations, children leaving home, alienation of friend, death of pet or hero
- Changes in home life: getting married, having child, having spouse retire or becoming ill/recovering, returning to school, changing jobs, going into depression, moving to a new house/remodeled old one, experience increase/decrease of domestic tension
- Personal Changes: getting sick or well, experiencing notable success or failure, changing eating habits, sleep patterns, sex, starting/stopping school, changing lifestyle or appearance
- Work and Finances changes: getting fired, retiring, changing jobs, changes within organization, increase/decrease income, taking on new loans/mortgages, discovering career advancement is blocked
- Inner changes: spiritual awakening, deepening social/political awareness, spuchological insights, changes in self-image or values, discovery of new dream/abandonment of old one
Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe’s stress scale for events: 100 for death to 11 for minor law-breaking. Found correlation with health:
- [average american has 1 in 5 chance of hospitalization in 2 years]
- <150: “average” 33% chance of serious health change in next 2 years
- 150-300 points: 50% chance
- 300+ points: 90% chance (promotion man was in this category)
other examples: colds during honeymoons, illnesses after retirement!
- When you’re in transition you find yourself coming back in new ways to old activities.
- Every transition begins with an ending. We have to let go of the of things 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.
- Although it is advantageous to understand your own style of endings, some part of you will resist that understanding as though your life depended on it.
- First there is an ending, then a beginning, and an important empty or fallow time in between. That is the order of things in nature.
Think back over the endings in your own life. Go back to you early childhood and recall the first experiences involving endings that you can remember. (death in family, parent’s departure on trip, death of pet, friend moving away). Continue forward in life history and note all the endings you can recall (physical, relationships, places, social groups, hobbies, interests, sports, responsibilities, training, jobs).
What you bring with you to a transitional situation is the style you have developed for dealing with endings. Looking back over your ending experiences, what can you ay about you own style of bringing situations to a close? Is it abrupt and designed to deny the impact of the change, or is it so slow and gradual that it is hard to see that anything important is happening? Do you tend to be active or passive in these terminal situations? That is, is it your initiative that brings thing stop term or do events just happen to you?
How do you act at the end of an evening or night on the town. Do you try to drag things out by starting new conversations and activities, or do you say suddenly that it was a nice evening and dash out? Or what about me recent larger ending: leaving a job or moving from a neighborhood. Did you say goodbye to everyone, or did you leave a day ahead of schedule just so that you could avoid these goodbyes?
Investigate the characteristic way of beginning things by looking over the past, starting with childhood, just as you did with endings.
2. A lifetime of transitions
What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening, yet has only one voice? —The Riddle of the Sphinx
The human being. —Oedipus’s solution to the Riddle
The riddle is about transition from dependency, to separateness and independence to suffering and deepened insight/disengagement.
The purpose of this chapter is to look over the context of the map to see where your boat is heading.
de-velop-ment means “unfolding” and occurs uninterruptedly throughout a lifetime. Ex. The first signs of a midlife transition occurs during the transition to independence (“I can’t be getting old yet, I’m still struggling with my adolescence!”)
- Gail Sheehy’s Passages:The Predicable Crises of Adult Life (1976)
- Roger Gould’s Transformations: Growth and Change in the Adult Years
- Daniel J. Levinson’s The Seasons of a Man’s Life
Two great developmental shifts:
- End to old dependencies and the establishment of the person as a separate social entity
- Movement beyond that separateness to something more complex, to a deeper sense of interrelatedness
Midlife is a mixture of the above influences.
The End of Childhood is one part of the shift from morning (dependence) to noon (independence). The other part is the establishment of a separate identity, distinct from being so-and-so’s child.
Erik Erikson’s believe that every phase of life has a task. Failing to complete it satisfactory means you make the transition into the next phase accompanied by unfinished business. (ex. divorced woman not resolving identity issues re-emerge as “I feel like I’m sixteen again.” ends up trying different roles like a teenager. She discovered that once she had accepted her experience as natural, she rather enjoyed it.)
On your own
Entering the adult world (Daniel J. Levinson). The Erikson task for this time is forging strong new interpersonal relationships and thereby exploring you capacity for intimacy. In the broadest sense, we might say this time is one of “searching for a place” and that the transitions likely to take place involve experimenting with an eye to making commitments.
Charlotte Buhler noted that physical dependence on parents ended by the late teens, and commitments that were long lasting were not made until almost thirty. The in-between years were spent in roles and relationships that were technically “adult” but were actually “preparatory [in] character” to what the person was going to do and be during the bulk of the adult years.
aka Levinson’s “novice period” of adulthood. Transitions during the time have a special poignancy and anxiousness about them, for they seem to threaten a return to the old dependency that we’re trying to put behind us.
Age Thirty Transition (Levinson)/Opening up what’s inside (Gould): The time of second thoughts: early place finders may regret that they did not try different options before making long-term commitments, and the experimenters may wonder whether they waited to long and missed some hidden moment when settling down would have felt just right and have worked. Various transitions began with the discovery that roles and relationships were starting to pinch and bind.
Recognize the reason for these feelings and realize that they are natural. Just because things are up-in-the-air now and you sometimes feel as if you were right back where you started, this is not a sign that you have made a mistake or have been wasting your life for the past ten years. It is only a sign that you are in one of life’s natural and periodic times of readjustment and renewed commitment.
You know the rules now, and you’re beginning to sense what you can and cannot do well.. You are, for better or for worse, an undisputed grown-up. The question is, now what are you going to do?
Second thoughts for many provide a clearer sense of personal direction than they have hitherto known—and even some goal or project that embodies that direction.
Mid-life crisis Things to be aware of:
- There are not a discreet number of identifiable periods of crisis; rather adulthood unfolds its promise in an alternating rhythm of expansion and contraction, change and stability.
- At this time most people find life moving in alternating periods of stability and change. The mid-life transition is the first of these transition times after the end of the novice period.
- It is the result not of new factors but a mixture of old and new ones. It’s both a beginning and an end.
If you reach your dreams, you ask yourself, “Is this it? Is this what I’ve been trying to reach?” If you don’t you get the “nevers” (James Bugental) and the realization you have been chasing a carrot on a stick.
They sometimes open the door to new activities:
- Gandhi discovered at fifty his real mission of nonviolent resistance
- Cervantes was older than fifty when he began his career as a novelist
- Lou Andreas Salome was in her sixties when she became a psychoanalyst
- Grandma Moses and Colonel Sanders
Forest-dweller (Hindu): Your own expectations become important. These are a product of culture or family history. You begin the move from householder to this. The name suggests a turning away from the world’s business and going into solitude of the forest for a time of reflection and study.
Social usefulness is no longer an aim for him, although he does not question its desirability. Fully aware as he is of the social unimportance of his creative activity, he looks upon it as a way of working out his own development. —Carl Jung
The task of this half of life is “homecoming.”
ex. Odysseus and the failure at Ismaros in the beginning of The Odyssey. It’s a tale of unlearning the things that made him legendary in the Iliad.
- Tricks Polyphemus (“famous” in Greek) by saying his name is “nobody” = giving up identity, and finding that nonidentity is a source of power
- song of the Sirens = self-destruction that lurks beneath the surface of everything that calls upon us to turn aside
- lotus fruit = make us forget the journey itself and our real destination
- Calupso’s promise to stay with her and never grow old = the fantasy that we can stop the on-going process of life transitions
- princes living off his riches in Ithaca = confusion and distractions that block our inner homecomings, there is no welcoming, but we must fight to claim our own rightful place
Demands of the homecoming:
- Unlearn the style of mastering the world that we used to take us through the first half of life/
- We resist our own longings to abandon the developmental journey and refuse invitations to stay forever at some attractive stopping place.
- Recognize that it will take real effort to regain the inner “home.”
This period offers opportunity to break with the social condition that carried us thus far and to something new and different. People who broke the rules of not changing between 30-60:
- Joshua Slocum: set sail around the world at 51.
- Handel: deeply in debt and recovering from a stroke when he accepted a commission at 57 in which he wrote Messiah.
- Edith Hamilton: did not begin work as a mythographer until she retired from teaching at 60
How does the phrase “The End of Childhood” recall your past? The coming-of-age rituals set the tone for a lifetime of subsequent transformations and their celebrations.
What memories and feelings do you associate with the phrase: “on your own”?
What would you say is you own natural stage of life? Were you born to be seventeen or seventy? Are you a perennial twenty-five-year-old, or are you still waiting for you entrance cue at fifty?
Which of your own life transitions have been the most important so far? What is the chronology of your own experience with transition?
When you have done this, begin with the early transition and see what you can say about “developmental issues” that were involved in each transition.
3. Relationships and Transition
Starts with a hypothetical couple: Don and Betty with two children.
Changes that signal transitions in relationship that are so deep and far-reaching are unlikely to disappear with time. At this point you find that the relationship that served pretty well up to this point is being put under enormous strain.
In the example, “Don” was a stranger to his own real needs and interests so long, he no longer knew what he wanted, or even who he was.
Although an answer was slow in taking shape, both of them felt a great sense of relief having acknowledged the old way was no longer viable and they were in transition.
Transition, Relationships, and Resonance.
Interpersonal resonance: way in which the developmental issues being dealt with by one member of a family (or any group) re-awaken or intensify similar issues in another.
With children, the tendency is to live vicariously, but “I guess it’ll be better if I do my own business and let her do hers.”
Transition and the Interpersonal System
All systems have characteristic that although their members may consciously try to change the way they behave within the system, they also often unwittingly perpetuate the system in its current form by undermining their own attempts to change it.
Relationships are always structured by unspoken agreements, although people are seldom conscious of it.
We are more like stories that are slowly unfolding according to our own reestablished inner themes and plots. Each person’s life is a story that is telling itself in the living of it, and requires others to play certain kinds of roles.
A life transition brings them to the point where each party has the opportunity to discover new inner resources that have hitherto been lived out mainly through the other person.
The partner who is aware of the transition and its implication for a relationship to begin alone the question of what is ending in a relationship and what to do about it. More often than not, it turns out that the ending is not some external situation but an attitude or an assumption or a self-image that both partners have held.
Various actions can help transition:
- The partners should discuss what each of them is experiencing.
- They should use the transition framework to structure that talk and to realize that relinquishing old arrangements and being left in the neutral zone is difficult and confusing.
- It helps to imagine the self-doubt that an an anxiety producing new beginning may be causing the other. It helps to imagine how lost and confused the other feels when long-time patterns disappear and leave only a blank page to star at in life’s book.
A checklist for people in a relationship-in-transition:
1. Take your time. Outer changes can be instant but inner reorientations takes time.
2. Arrange temporary structures. You need to work out ways of going on while the inner work is being done (e.g. temporary way to make decisions, allocate responsibilities, etc.)
3. Don’t act for the sake of action. Such things usually lead to more difficulty. The transition process requires we bring a chapter of our lives to conclusions and discover what we need to learn for the next step.
4. Take care of yourself in little ways. Find some continuities that are important when everything else seems to be changing.
5. Explore the other side of the change. Instead of seeing the other as an adversary, try to understand their situation.
6. Find someone to talk to. Professional or just good friend. Not for advice necessarily, but to put words to feelings and dilemmas
7. Think of transition as a process of leaving the status quo, living for a while in a fertile “time-out,” and then coming back with an answer. Like Arnold Toynbee’s view that societal advancement comes only after a “time of troubles.”
4. Transitions in the Work Life
Whoever in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a [person’s] life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires. —Wolfgang Von Goethe
The natural development pattern is not for people to keep the same dreams but to relinquish old dreams and generate new ones throughout their lifetimes. Life is not an upward-trending diagonal of increasing achievement but a spiral of linked cycles—the completion of each leading to a new cycle of experience and activity based on a new dream.
In our culture, there are forces that stand in the way of this normal, cyclical pattern of development (e.g. emphasis on “success” monetary success, profession prestige, and other distance/elevated goals) and not what makes them happy.
Distant material goals (even though it’s a misleading one) haunts them at each successive transition point, not only where they must establish a direction and tap into a renewed source of energy but also where they are bedeviled by the sense that they don’t really know what they want or need.
An extremely high level of change in today’s organization is likely to keep your career in a semipermanent state of transition.
First task is to let go: Endings come first.The transition always starts with an ending.
- To become something else, you have to stop being what you are now;
- to start doing things a new way, you have to end the way you are doing them now;
- and to develop a new attitude or outlook, you have to let go of the old one you have now.
Neutral zone: This feels like a meaningless time. But it is actually a very important time. You are receiving signals and cues as to what you need to become for the next stage of you work life. And, unless you disrupt it by trying to rush through the neutral zone quickly, you are slowly being transformed into the person you need to be to move forward in your life.
How disruptive is determined by two things:
- The inherent importance of the change that triggers them; and, second, whether they coincide with a time when a developmental shift is occurring within you.
- Your own career transitions will also resonate with those that others are going through. (ex: colleague “forgetting” again and being amazed for the third time was really a sign that he was unhappy with his own career, but had every years earlier decided that he was too old to make a shift).
- Also, personal changes will affect it. (difficulty at home, health, finances, sex life, spiritual world) can change without sending ripples across the world of you hob and your career. Sometimes the change intensifies your energy, but more often it diverts energy from work to the area of your life that is changing.
Attempts to reinstate you old motivation by reward or punishment are futile as trying to keep leaves on the trees once they’ve started to fall.
Consider the Age Forty transition: The transition from being motivated by the chance to demonstrate competence to being motivated by the chance to find personal meaning) in the work and its results. It is a shift from the question of _how to the question of why. The work world rewards competence, but sometime that loses its motivation.
The old flame can sometimes be wrinkled temporarily by shifting to an area where you must begin all over again and develop new competence, but the effects of such a change are usually short-lived. The season of competence is passing, in some late-flowering transplants.
Hindu idea of the natural seasons of life
- The Time of Apprenticeship. People often imagine their sense is a result of taking a real job, getting married, leaving home, graduating college but this is confusing cause and effect. They are changing inwardly, and the events of the external change serve to mark and symbolize the inward transition.
The Shift to Householding. The “business” of working and raising a family. This is a time of roles and responsibilities—a time when many modern people are not just “working” but pursuing a “career.”. Two kinds of transitions: 1) changes triggered by the organization in which the person works and changes to the individual (promotions, transfers).
The End of Householding. When people are meant to stop being Householders and start the period of inner search and discovery they call the Forest-Dweller phase. Usually keyed in the birth of one’s first grandchild because the next generation takes over the Householder part. In our time and place, this is strange. Early retirement? Wrong career? dead-end career? are questions that come from getting caught up in the content of our situation and from overlooking the underlying pattern. the feelings that we encounter are best understood as signs of a life passage that has been stripped of its rites and tossed aside as no longer useful.
The Final Chapter. Hindu’s called this Sannyasin as one who emerges from the Forest-Dweller with a much deeper understanding of life and the self than people have found in earlier phases. Once your identity was non-existent, then it was new and untried. It was only through transition that you let go of whatever you then thought was critical to hold on to, and then you waited a while so that whatever was to come next could emerge and become the new way and new identity to replace the old.
The business/task of this point is to help people to understand the great alternating current of life, the rhythm where
- being is followed by
- letting go, which is followed by
- emptiness, which is followed by
- renewed energy and purpose which is followed by
It’s not necessarily salaried work, but it must return to society the fruits of those discoveries made during the third quarter of life.
The two questions you ask yourself whenever you are in transition:
- What is it time to let go in my own life right now?
- What is standing backstage, in the wings of my life, waiting to make its entrance? (The answer is something internal, subjective)
Questions that will help you explore the transition and its significance in the context of your life and career
- What are the indications that your work life is in transition (not change)? (where it’s time to let go of an idea, assumption, self-image, dream)
- What is the developmental context of this work life transition? If you had to put into words the personal and career issues that you are dealing with at this point in your life, what would they be? If you had to give a title to the chapter of your work life that is drawing to a close, what would it be? … then what is the title of the next chapter of your work life?
- Imagine that you are really old, from the vantage point of the future, was this present point in your life a time when it was a good idea to keep on in the same direction, or was it a time that cried on for change? aAnd if the latter, what kind of change was called for?
Part 2 The Transition Process Itself
Arnold van Gennep coined the term rites of passage as the way in which traditional societies structured life transitions. These ceremonial occasions consisted of three phases which he called separation, transition, and incorporation.
Rites do not transplant well. They are not techniques for doing something but lenses through which to magnify the experience of something.
Instead we rename these traditional rites as:
- The Neutral Zone
- The New beginning
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” from Four Quartets
The story about a man who came to talk about his second marriage and wasn’t interested in his wife’s view he was emotionally tied to his first wife. Told the story of two monks traveling through the countryside on a rainy season.
It was;t the new beginning that accounted for the confusion they were experiencing but rather the termination of their old lives.
Because of her view that disintegration meant malfunction, she assumed that what was needed was a way to repair her life, but she quickly came to see that no mere fixing up of things would suffice.
The five aspects of the natural ending experience:
- Disengagement: traditional believes that at times of inner transition people need to be separated from their familiar places in the social order, even if they believe as if they were not acting to disengage (e.g. Christ’s 40 day journey in wilderness; Theseus leaves Troetzen for ordeals in journey to Athens thinking he is going to Tarshish; Jonah flees his vocations and heads to sea; Oedipus leaves home to avoid fate that he meets along the way). Note: the person who has just been fired or lost a parent or had a heart attack is not in the frame of mind to listen to talk about symbolic events—and certainly not to hear that it may be “a gift in disguise.” Disappearance of the old system forces us to devise a new one, the way that a breakdown in the economic order might lead to barter. It is rather that as long as a system is working, it is very difficult for a member to imagine an alternative way of life and an alternative identity.
- Dismantling: Disengagement only stops the old signals and cues from being received. It leaves untouched the life infrastructre that you’ve constructed in response to those signals. (e.g. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stages of grief). There is a separate process (“mourning process”) that we don’t hear much about that is not so much emotional as cognitive. It is one which people gradually stop thinking themselves as part of a we, and start thinking of themselves as an I. This shift is often accompanied or punctuated by a good deal of emotion, but those feelings are reactions tot he process, not the process itself. Traditional displays of grief (vigil, wear black, ceremony) slowly dismantles or unpacks your relationship to that person, or the relationship or identity that you have lost.
- Disidentification: You also lose your old ways of defining yourself (e.g. divorcée said she had “lost her mirror”). An important element in most passage ceremonies: the removal of the old identity’s signs and the temporary assumption of a nonidentity which is represented by shaved heads, painted faces, masks, strange clothing or no clothing at all, or the abandonment of one’s old name. (Ex. when author retired, daughter asked what he did because they were chatting in school at what daddies do. This troubled him. As time went on, he grew more comfortable with what might be called a “participial” identity, identifying with ing words (gardening, writing, running, lecturing) rather than with nouns.) Being disidentified is an important part of the termination process because of the need to lose the bonds of the person we think we are so that we can go through a transition to a new identity.
- Disenchantment: her is still the reality in a person’s head—a picture of the “way things are,” which ties him to the old world with subtle strands of assumption and expectation. The sun will rise tomorrow, my mother loves me, the tribe will endure, the gods are just: These things are so, and if they are not, then my world is no longer real. The discovery that in some sense one’s world is indeed no longer real is what is meant. (historical ex. The Ndembu in Africa, Hopi youths, aboriginal Australia) (personal ex. no Santa Clause, parents lie, friends let you down). Old must be cleared away before the new can grow. The mind is a vessel that must be emptied if new wine is to be put in. The entire termination process violates our too-seldom examined idea that development means gain and has nothing to do with loss. The lesson of disenchantment begins with the discovery that if you want to change—really to change, and not just switch positions—you must realize that some significant part of your old reality was in your head, not out there. The thing that keeps this misperception in place is an “enchantment,” a spell cast by the past on the present. Most of the time, these enchantments work fairly well, but at life’s turning points they break down. Reality has many layers, non “wrong” but each appropriate to a particular phase of intellectual and spiritual development. Lacking that perspective (of looking underneath and being ready to understand more) on such experiences, however, we often missed the point and simply become “disillusioned.” The disenchanted person moves on, but the disillusioned person stops and goes through the play again with new actors. Such a person is on a perpetual quest for a real friend, a true mate, and a trustworthy leader.
- Disorientation: The “reality” that is left behind in all endings is not just a picture on the wall. It is a sense of which way is up and which way is down; it is a sense of which way is forward and which way is back. It is, in short, a way of orienting oneself and of moving forward in the future (Robert Frost’s “lost enough to find yourself.”) . First casualty of disorientation is likely to be our sense of (and plans for) the future. This loss of motive power and direction is frightening to many individuals and those around them, and it may in fact be dangerous in a practical sense if it threatens the essential arrangements of a person’s life. Disorientation is meaningful, but it isn’t enjoyable. This affects our sense of space and time.
The story of Oedipus:
Obviously, the riddle is about transition, but see it as a symbolic representation when we try to hold on to our old lives after we’ve outlived them, against the natural order of transition.
After he saved Thebes from the Sphinx, they asked him to be a ruler: They ask you not to change now. From home, from work, even from your own mind comes the appeal to continue being the one you’ve been. Don’t change. Do the old, familiar thing again. Just when you feel drawn toward new beginnings, powerful inner and outer forces are blocking the way. The dream is your life.
the oedipal situation is not the triangle of mother, father and child, but rather the situation of the adult who is torn between the developmental thrust that brings about life transition and the impulse toward repetition that aborts them. Viewed symbolically, the withinger crops and the stillborn creatures are the dying of an old life phase and the feelings of deadness that so often signal the start of the termination process.
See Oedipus killing his father on the road. Like many parents this mythic other blocked his son’s way and denied his right to emerge into his own.
(After he symbolically/literally played his father and became ruler). That phase of life (the heroic phase in mythic terms) was done and something else was ready to take its place. This natural and inexorable succession of life phases is the very point of the sphinx’s riddle. Oedipus knew the “answer” but failed to apply it in his own crucial and complex life situation.
The blight affecting Thebes: after a certain point the very ways of being that brought forth and sustained a life phase begin to destroy it.
After the Oracle told him to slay the murderer of the Laius, Oedipus announces he will find the man and banaish him. In the process, the hero slays “the hero” in himself. The goal of one phase of life becomes the burden of the next. That is why rites of passage begin with a symbolic death. Without that death, the life becomes “polluted,” as the oracle said the city of Thebes had become.
Also remember the sequel: Oedipus Rex. Sophocles meant us to see that after the death came a rebirth and a new way of being in the world. By the time we meet Oedipus again in Oedipus At Colonus, he has passed through the suffering of loss. He is the 3rd stage of the sphinx’s riddle: old but spiritually enlightened and a blessing to whatever town harbors him.
What is it time to let go of?
The changes in a transition are driven to reach a real goal, but transitions start with letting go of what no longer fits or is adequate to the life stage you are in.
Whatever it is, it is internal. Of the five aspects of ending, only “disengagement” refers exclusively to external things.
Ex of change to avoid transition: storming out of job (“rotten, no-good boss!”) rather than discover what it is in themselves that keeps finding such bosses to work for. They end another (yet another!) relationship rather than let go of behaviors, attitudes, assumptions, and images of self or others that keep making relationships turn out this way.
The experience of ending
Endings begin with something going wrong. At Ismaros, Odysseus failed where he had always succeed before. At Thebes, Oedipus experience a subtler and more pervasive loss—a deadening, a withering, a loss of vitality.
Nor do the elements in an ending come in any particular order. Nor is there a normal order of reactions to an ending.
The point is that it is important to let yourself or others in transition experience an ending.
Endings are, let’s remember, experiences of dying. They are ordeals, and sometimes they challenge so basically our sense of who we are that we believe they will be the end of us.
In no rite or myth do we find the unitary death as something final, but always as a condition sine qua non of a transition to another mode of being, a trial indispensable of regeneration; that is, to bthe beginning of a new life.
6. The Neutral Zone
I do my utmost to attain emptiness; I hold firmly to the stillness. Do that which is consistent in taking no action; pursue that which is not meddlesome; savor that which has no flavor.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Modern society has lost appreciation for this gap in the continuity of existence. For us, “emptiness” represents only the absence of something.
The neutral zone is meant to eb a moratorium from the conventional activities of your everyday existence. The actives of your ordinary life you “you” by presenting you with a set of signals that are difficult to respond to in any but the old way.
Reference to The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda being a westerner’s interaction with a neutral zone experience.
For many people, the breakdown of the old “enchantment” and the old self-image uncovers a hitherto unsuspected awareness. Too many people either deny this aspect of the neutral zone experience or else become overwhelmed by it. To deny it is to lose the opportunity it provides for an expanded sense of reality and a deepened sense of purpose. And to be overwhelmed by it is just as unfortunate., for you then have no way to integrate the experience with the rest of your life. Either way, the transition process fails to provide you with the enrichment that is one of its natural but almost forgotten gifts.
I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped…And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any of the actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by someone…[I asked myself] what would be the outcome of what I do today? Of what I shall do tomorrow? What will be the outcomes of all my life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything?
Surrender: accept your need for this time in the neutral zone — one must give in to the emptiness and stop struggling to escape it. The process of transformation is essentially a death and rebirth process rather than a mechanical modification.
The process of disintegration and reintegration is the source of renewal (van Gennep). It is only by returning for a time to the formlessness of the primal energy that renewal can take place. We need it just the way that an apple tree needs the cold of winter.
The other reason for the neutral zone is the perspective it provides on the stages themselves. From the neutral zone, the realities of the everyday world look transparent and insubstational.
“what to do” consists not of ways out, but of ways in; that is, it involves ways of amplifying and making more real the essential neutral zone experience.
- The Trap of fast forward
- The Trap of Reverse.
Find a regular time and place to be alone. The Hebrew word for the “wilderness” of Jesus, Moses and Buddha is the same word that means “sanctuary.” (aka unnamable “nowhere” and holy ground).
Begin a log of neutral zone experiences. We need to translation the hieroglyphic (see quote below), and in doing so make sense of what we are experiencing. When you record your experience, you slow down and force yourself to put things into words. And out of the blur of your experience, shapes start to emerge.
Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Take this pause in the action of your life to write an autobiography. The past isn’t like a landscape or a vase of flowers that is just there. It is more like the raw material awaing a builder.
_ Take this opportunity to discover what you really want._
Think of what would be unloved in your life if it ended today. Endings are dying in one sense, the obituary is an appropriate statement about your past. As you and here in the emptiness of the neutral zone, what do you think and feel about the past?
Take a few days to go on your own version of a passage journey. Spend a few days alone during which you reflect consciously on the present transition process in your own life. The place should be an unfamiliar one and free of ordinary influences from your daily situation, as was the initiate’s journey of old. The simpler and quieter the setting, the more chance you will have to attend to your inner business. This retreat is a journey into emptiness and a time to cultivate receptivity. The more you leave behind, the more room you have to find something new. Keep a vigil during one of your nights.
Realize: The neutral zone is a time when the real business of transition takes place. 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. Although such shifts cannot occur without an ending, and although they cannot bear fruit without a new beginning, it is in the neutral zone that the real work of transformation takes place.
The pattern of withdrawal and return (Arthur Toynbee): it is into some rabbit hole or cave or forest wilderness that creative individuals have always withdrawn of the eve of their rebirth. He found this in St. Paul. St. Benedict, Gregory the Great, the Buddha, Muhammad, machiavelli, and Dante.
- Surrender: Accept your need for this time in the neutral zone
- Find a regular time and place to be alone
- Begin a log of neutral zone experiences
- Take this pause in the action of your life to write an autobiography.
- Take this opportunity to discover what you really want.
- Think of what would be unloved in your life if it ended today.
- Take a few days to go on your own version of a passage journey.
7. You Finish with a New Beginning
He has half the deed done, who has
Made a beginning.
We come to the beginnings only at the end.
For as a society views birth, so it will view rebirth. Just as our primal beginning is mechanized, so are all subsequent beginnings; they are viewed as occasions for getting things started again after they have stopped.
John Galsworthy wrote: “the beginnings… of all human undertakings are untidy.”
When we are ready to make a new beginning, we will shortly find an opportunity. The first hint may take the form of an inner idea or of an external opportunity, its hallmark being not a logical sign of validity but a “resonance” it sets up in us. Sometimes the hint comes in the form of a dream.
Genuine beginnings depend upon this kind of inner realignment rather than on external shifts, for it is when we are aligned with deep longings (the real wantings discussed in Ch. 5) that we become powerfully motivated.
Things often come down to money and time that people always say they can’t manage to launch a new beginning they dream of. Ex. Abraham Lincoln’s youth had a poverty of ambition, difficult marriage, mediocre Congressional term and terrible bouts of what today would be diagnosed as depression. It was out of that long neutral zone that he found seeds of his future and rapid rise to presidency. Other ex (Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Walt Whitman).
New beginnings are accessible to everyone, and everyone has trouble with them. (Some parts of us resist them; anxiety; confusion).
Often that trouble is hidden by those who have gone through them. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote of her life @ 35: “Somewhere along the line of development we discover what we really are, and then we make our real decision for which we are responsible. Make that decision primarily for yourself because you can never really live anyone else’s life, not even upper wpm child’s.” (what she doesn’t mention was she had become disenchanted and disoriented by the discovery of her husband’s affair with one of her most trusted friends).
Inner self that takes over when we threaten to go through transition process: some people it is activated whenever risk is involved; others experience the inner sabotage whenever they try to come in from the cold and settle down. One person’s safety involves inactivity and another’s involves perpetual motion; but either way, a new beginning upsets a long-standing arrangement.
Distinguish between a real new beginning in someone’s life and a simple defensive reaction to an ending.
There are two signs that are worth looking for before you start:
- The reaction of people who know you well: not whether they approve or diapprove but whether they see what you propose to do as something new or simply a replay of an old pattern.
- From the transition process itself: Have you really moved through endings into the neutral zone and found there the beginning you now want to follow, or is this “beginning” a way of avoiding an ending or aborting the neutral zone experience>
Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities.
Things to do to support this process:
- Stop getting ready and to act. “Getting ready” can turn out to be an endless task, and one of the forms that inner resistance can often take is an attempt to make just a few more (and then more, and again more) preparations.
- Begin to identify yourself with the final result of the new beginning. What is it going to feel like when you have actually done whatever it is that you are setting out to do? Experience yourself as one who can do things like that.
- Take things step by step and resist the siren song that sings about some other route where everything goes smoothly and events are always exciting and meaningful. The things you need to do may seem dull compared to the goal, but this is the trivia from which vital new ventures emerge.
The inner beginnings are still going on. At such a time, people often say, “I guess I’m just not used to this new situation yet,” but it would be more accurate to say that “I’m not quite fully the new person yet—but I’m getting there.” It is a time to be gentle with yourself or with the other person, a time of the little supports and indulgences that make things easier. And it is time to acknowledge that, as much as we long for them, new beginnings can be things to be resisted just as much as the loss-filled ending and the ambiguous and frustrating neutral zone were.
Not everything vanishes in the ending process, of course, and some people find it important to experience the continuities in their lives when so much else is changing.
The transition process is really a loop in the life journey, a going out and away from the main flow for a time and then a coming around and back. The neutral zone is meant to be only a temporary state. It is, as they say, a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Inwardly and outwardly, one comes home. As a wonderful Zen saying expresses it, “After enlightenment, the laundry.”
Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The story of Psyche
(Oracle said Psyche must dressed for a funeral and abandoned): In stories one does not ask why, for everything goes according to a plan that is patterned on life itself. the oracle is saying that no new time of life is possible without the death of the old lifetime. To gain, you first must give up.
(After Amor spirits her away to his castle) As always happens, an ending clears the ground for a new beginning. In this story, the person did little—everything just happened. Some transitions are like that. They just happen. But when they happen this way, something is missing. The outer situation has taken shape, but the inner state remains unchanged. The old outlook, the old self-image, the old value system remain intact. Outwardly, the change is complete by the real transition process has hardly begun.
(Psyche seeks a peek at her lover and accidentally wakes him up) Losses happen because it is time to let go of that way of being connected. Psyche had live din the darkness for long enough, and it was now time for her to see. Yet the change was a violation of the old rules, and it destroyed the old situation,. It was time for her to change—to grow and deepen, to take responsibility for who and where she was. It was time for the inner changes to catch up with the outer ones.
(Given impossible tasks by Aphrodite) The first time was passive—it had all just happened to her. Now, however, she was ready to act—but the tasks! they were impossible ones! She tried to do them, but then she had to give up.
What are the ants and reeds and the eagle? Whydoes something appear to help Psyche each time she has given up hope? The “helpful creature” is a common element in folklore and dreams, and it corresponds to some instinctive and subtrational level of insight and energy. the tasks of transition are not, it seems, of the sort that one can consciously set out to accomplish. Yet neither are they taen care of in the automatic fashion of Psyche’s original and outer transition on the mountaintop. Now she must struggle and even exhaust herself before help arrives—almost as though it is only when one is at the end of one’s resources that new and hitherto unsuspected powers appear.
(Her trip to the underworld). Most significant transitions—the sort of inner change that Psyche is dealing with—involve a time in hell. You go down before you come up. And most of these journeys must be taken alone. All our habits of caring for others (and seeing ourselves as people who care for others) become self-defeating. We need to resist the old impulses to take care of others and instead to pay attention during this time to what we are doing and why we are doing it. We are going where we have to go if we are to do the god’s bidding. Having left behind a life we have outgrown, we must continue the transition process to find our new life.
(Psyche peeks in the box and is overcome) That is how it is in the wilderness of the neutral zone: One encounters there forms of energy and insight that are life transforming, but also just barely supportable.
Happily ever after… or until the next major life transition, whichever came first.
vitiate: There is a danger that what I am saying about disoriteantion and the ending process in general will become merely a rationalization or an anesthetic for personal distress: “Hey isn’t that wonderful! I just bumped into a tree. I must be disorieted!” To do that is to deny the real experience and to vitiate the transition. Disorientation is meaningful, but it isn’t enjoyable.


St. Matthew Biography, Life, Interesting Facts
Also Known For :
Birth Place :
Early Years And Education
Levi, son of Alphaeus, was born in the 1st century AD. He was born in Capernaum, a small fishing village. The town sat on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Levi started his career as a tax collector. As a result of his work, Levi would have been proficient in the Aramaic and Greek languages. He worked with the Romans in his role, and due to this, the other Jews disliked him immensely.
Call to Ministry
Jesus called Levi to the Ministry, and Levi followed him. He became known as Matthew.
Matthew followed Jesus as one of his four disciples. He saw both the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, and he preached the gospel in Jerusalem.
After preaching in Judea, scholars believe he traveled to other countries to continue his preaching. Matthew supposedly authored the Gospel of Matthew, but there is no proof he wrote it. Fragments of other gospels have been found, also attributed to Matthew. These are the Gospel of the Nazarenes, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Hebrews.
Matthew was one of the early followers of Jesus. He is known as Matthew the Apostle, Saint Matthew, and his birth name of Levi.
Several churches recognize Matthew as a saint. These include the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox, among others.


The valid states, and state transitions, for a stream are shown in the following figure.
Each of the circles denotes a stable state. Each of the lines denotes a transition that can occur as the result of a function call that operates on the stream. Five groups of functions can cause state transitions.
Functions in the first three groups are declared in <stdio.h>:
Functions in the remaining two groups are declared in <wchar.h>:
The state diagram shows that you must call one of the position functions between most write and read operations:
You cannot call a read function if the last operation on the stream was a write.
You cannot call a write function if the last operation on the stream was a read, unless that read operation set the end-of-file indicator.
Finally, the state diagram shows that a position operation never decreases the number of valid function calls that can follow.


In the last 10 years, Gaza has endured three major wars, and they are on the brink of war for a fourth right now in 2018.
This year, more illegal Israeli settlements have been placed on Palestinian land, angering Palestinians.
Additionally this year, the relocation of the American Embassy to Jerusalem was another major event that occurred, stirring the already boiling pot.
Gaza has suffered a lot, especially with the Great March of Return and the death of many innocent civilians. Moreover, Israel is not applying their policies in accordance with political decisions after the events of 1967. Israel also does not acknowledge Arabs who remain on the land which they believe does not belong to Palestine.
Living in Gaza is hard because of the blockades placed around the territories by different political sects; getting out is hard, if not impossible.
Gaza is also in extreme poverty due to the blockades; between the Israeli bombings and the poverty, people are obviously finding it hard to live.
To make matters worse, Israel does not follow most rules set by international law. Palestinians are protesting more by the day, and clashes between Palestine and Israel continue to become more severe, resulting in political and economic clashes.
Why Gaza is close to being uninhabitable, according to Gazans:
- Poverty caused by political and economic blockades.
- What the government wants is more important than what the people want.
- There is no proper infrastructure (sewage system is poor, and electricity is cut off from lack of capital).
- Child labor caused by the poverty of big families and early marriage.
- Israel forces prohibit fishing by the sea, which was a major part of Gaza’s economy.
- Houses are small, and families are big.
- Gaza is densely populated.
- Associations tend not to fully donate.
- Resources are scarce because of blockades from Egypt and Israel, and smuggling can lead to death.
- There is not enough food for livestock, and barely any food for people.
The people of Gaza receive their health and educational services from the authorities in Ramallah. Social and governmental services are provided by these authorities. Recently, the Palestinian Authority, run by President Mahmoud Abbas, has cut Gazan’s job salaries down 40% because of political threats. Many workers were kicked out of their jobs because of the lack of government funding.
Also, many aids made to Gaza have stopped due to multiple interferences made by the American president, Donald Trump. The #DignityIsPriceless campaign has been released in response to the rejections in funding. Find out more here.
Public Opinion Poll #67 has also affected 1,000 people and 5,000 families were affected; over 200,000 people were also harmed because of indirect beneficiaries they would have received from certain funding.
In Gaza, there are two main forms of aid (money and humanitarian aid). There are many widely-known international organizations assisting in Gaza, such as the following:
- The Norwegian Refugee Council
- United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — UNRWA provides 90% of the food for Palestinian refugees in Gaza. They provide education and primary health services through worldwide funding from the United Nations. UNRWA built 24 clinics, 207 schools, and provides jobs for 13,000 employees.
- The Red Cross Societies
- The Palestine Red Crescent Society
- The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
- The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
- The World Food Program (for non-refugees)
How can you help?
There are aid communities in every district in Gaza, with 350 community-based centers in total licensed to help out women, children, and orphans. Everyone has a role to play and everyone has something to offer, as cliché as it sounds. The following are local and small associations which help the people of Gaza:
- Yaboos Charity in Rafah that serves multiple purposes
- El-Amal Rehabilitation Society specializes in treating patients that have been victims of war trauma
- Another local non-government organization (NGO) that works with women, agriculture, and child protection is Save Youth Future Society
- There is also The Women Program Center in Rafah that works closely with women and their rights in the region
- Gaza also has a lot of citizens that lost their hearing in the war; find out how to help with Atfaluna Alsum
- The Right to Live Society is a community-based center and non-profit organization that specializes in aiding people with Down’s syndrome in Gaza; you can find them on Facebook.
- Another community that specializes in aiding the people of Gaza is Tadamon
- Taawon funds the lives of orphans in Gaza, find out more here
- Since agriculture is scarce in Gaza, this association helps with the growth of resources for the people of Gaza
- Finally, find out how to be involved in the programs of the Palestinian Human Rights Center
For direct contact for volunteering or sending donations to various of the above associations, please contact Bilal Jhaish, a civil society expert in Rafah, Gaza, at +972 59- 946-1016.
To gain a more in-depth understanding of the dire situation in Gaza, take a look here.


I HAVE ALWAYS HAD A KEEN INTEREST in the natural world, but it wasn’t until about ten years ago that I first started taking a serious interest in one particular group of animals—birds.
We have a great diversity of natural habitat around the Bay of Quinte region, and with that comes an interesting range of bird species. From the stately bald eagle to the delicate hummingbird, the dull browns of the flycatchers to the bright colours of the wood-warblers, there is much to appreciate. One of my first experiences of birdwatching with a group was with the Quinte Field Naturalists. Early one spring morning, we stopped our car on the side of a road next to an area of scrubland. While listen-ing to the dawn chorus of birdsong for less than a minute, the group identified five different species of birds, without seeing a single one! Birdwatching has given me a greater understanding of the natural world, and a deeper appreciation for the importance of species diversity. Every creature matters.
The Hooded Merganser
During peak migration periods in early spring and late autumn, thousands of ducks can be seen staging in the west end of the Bay. A walk along the pier at Twelve O’Clock Point can be very rewarding, especially in late March or mid-November. Large rafts of redheads, goldeneyes and scaup congregate along the north shore. The smartly plumaged male hooded mergansers are the stars of the show, with their black-and-white crests, black backs and copper flanks. In summer, the hooded merganser breeds in our area near small bodies of water, using tree cavities, such as abandoned woodpecker holes, for nesting. The female lines the bottom of the nest cavity with her down feathers, and lays an average of ten to twelve eggs. Within a day of hatching, the ducklings are faced with the daunting task of hurtling themselves out of the nest down to the forest floor to join their mother, where together they will seek out water.
Since the banning of the pesticide DDT, the osprey’s population around the Great Lakes has made an impressive comeback. With the addition of man-made nesting platforms built specifically for the osprey, this raptor is now quite common along the Bay’s shore. It’s worth walking the section of Belleville’s Riverfront Trail near Memorial Park on Station Street, which hosts one of these nesting platforms. Over the years I’ve seen many successful pairs of osprey raise their young here. Throughout spring and summer, I enjoy stopping in to watch the daily activities of these birds. Typically, one parent will stay with the begging young close to the nest while the other parent goes fishing in the Bay.
The Virginia Rail
In spring I like to wake up at dawn and sneak out to the H.R. Frink Centre to walk quietly along the marsh boardwalk. Many birds start to sing their morning hymns, proclaiming their nesting territories and hoping to attract a mate. Among the din of calling birds and frogs, the grunting call of the Virginia Rail is occasionally heard. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to catch a glimpse of this shy bird, and maybe capture a photograph. Resembling a small heron, the Virginia rail shows mostly orange body feathers and grey cheeks. Rails seldom fly, preferring to flee danger by running through the cattails and sometimes even using their wings to propel themselves under water.
The Pileated Woodpecker
One winter while hiking the Drumlin Trail at the H.R. Frink Centre, I heard an incredible banging noise penetrating the stillness of the forest. I thought it must have been a lumberjack waging his battles against some stubborn tree trunk, but when I snuck closer, a great black-and-white woodpecker appeared, and I watched as it bombarded a dead stump with its ridiculously large beak. The pileated woodpecker lives in our woodlots year-round, making its living seeking out grubs and insects in dead and dying trees and creating large nest cavities for raising their young. Woodpecker nest sites are often later used by other cavity-nesting species, including wood ducks and small owls.
Check back to our bayofquine.ca/birds page for monthly Birds of the Bay updates from Tom.


Due to the change in the atmosphere as well as the never-ending demands of the customers are forcing the individuals to change their routine, which ultimately affects their health and well-being. The changing habits of a person are affecting their health and fitness. Therefore, it is essential to maintain the health as it helps in keeping the state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of any disease. coolsculpting seattle is one of the best place for fitness.
Exercises and fitness help in enhancing or maintaining physical fitness as well as the overall wellness and health. The importance of fitness is that it makes a person capable of living their life to its fullest extent by removing all types of stress, tensions, and mental illness. Fitness always plays a vital role in the growth period and people who are both, physical and mentally fit; they are less prone to any diseases and needs minor medical treatments.
How do you mean by fitness?
The term fitness is a buzzword in every community of people. It does not only refer to the physical fitness of a person; instead, it relates to the mental state of a person as well. When a person is physically fit, but mentally weak, then they encounter with various types of troubles in their life. They will feel incapable of resolving the issues of their personal life as well as will not be able to function optimally. One of the best ways to stay fit is to bike often. There’s nothing better then riding a bike in the open country! The only issue with riding your bike is the maintenance you have to constantly stay on top of. If you find yourself in a pinch with a broken derailleur hanger be sure to pick up an extra one here at https://derailleurhanger.com/. They provide the highest quality hangers at the lowest price.
The mental fitness of a person can be only being achieved if the function of the body goes well. It is necessary to relax the mind without putting much stress on it. One needs to eliminate all the tensions from the life if they want to live their life for more years without welcoming any types of problems related to the health. Several issues are associated with the mental health condition like the sugar problems, blood pressure issues and much more.
Why is it essential to be physically fit?
Health is always priceless. People who are saying that they are physically fit, then they are also healthier, and can maintain their most optimum weight, and are also not prone to any type health issues, mainly the cardiac health problems. Therefore, it is necessary to maintain a relaxed state of mind by keeping the body physically active, mentally stable and by taking healthy and nutritious foods. Health conditions and healthy home garage door repair san diego should always be given the priority. If the state of the health once goes down, then it will take too much time to bring back to the track.
Those persons who are physically active as well as mentally durable, they can face every up and down of their life. They never regret any types of mistakes as they always think that they made the right decision in their life. The changes in the life should not affect the mental conditions as changes are part and parcel of the experience. One needs to face it openly without putting themselves in problems.


It’s no secret that frequent ingestion of sugary drinks is bad for your health. According to a publication from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, people who drink soda regularly (once a day) increase their chances of developing Type 2 diabetes and run a higher risk of suffering a heart attack, as compared to those who do not consume soft drinks and other such beverages.
But that’s not all. Sugary drinks can also be detrimental to your teeth, provided that you drink them often and fail to take proper care of your teeth — meaning brushing and flossing daily.
Dr. Robert Beaglehole, a notable “anti-sugar lobbyist,” is urging parents to avoid giving their children sugary drinks and snacks. This outcry comes after Beaglehole had to remove 11 teeth from the mouth of a 3-year-old whose parents reportedly put Coca-Cola in his sippy cup. According to Stuff, a New Zealand news site, roughly 35,000 children under the age of 12 have teeth removed as a result of rotting — largely because of soda and sugary snacks.
In September of last year, the New Zealand Ministry of Health called for a ban on sugary drinks across the district health boards, reports the Otago Daily Times. Beaglehole was a major proponent in the decision, personally speaking with the heads of all 20 districts about why the ban should be implemented.
Beaglehole reportedly advocated the ban after he had pulled 56 rotten teeth from four different children, and then saw a Coca-Cola van on the property shortly thereafter.
When you consume soda, the sugar combines with the bacteria in your mouth and begins to slowly erode the teeth, according to WDA. In moderation, sugary drinks may be fine, but frequent consumption will have major consequences.


X-Band Bandpass Filter
X-Band Bandpass Filter: Applications and Role
Of the 4 basic types of RF filters (band-pass, band-stop, low-pass and high-pass), a band-pass filter is one that selects only a desired band of frequencies. This type of filter is a popular mainstay in the field of wireless transmitters and receivers, of which they limit the bandwidth of the output signal to the band allocated for transmission. And of the different letter bands in the radiofrequency spectrum, the X-band is one of the busiest, and most lucrative, and this is where X-band filters work, and thrive. Let’s take a look at the capacities of X-band bandpass filters.
The X Band Is The Microwave Radio Region
In the vastness of the electromagnetic spectrum, the X-band is identified as the segment of the microwave radio region. However, the frequency ranges for this region vary with the function or purpose. For example, in communication engineering. The X-band’s frequency range is indefinitely pegged at 7.0 to 11.2 gigahertz (GHz), while in radar engineering the frequency range is pegged at 8.0 to 12.0 GHz. And in this highly-specialized domain, X-Band band pass filters do their thing, with utmost efficiency.
The X-band is also heavily utilized in radar applications like synthetic aperture radar, continuous-wave, single-polarization, dual-polarization, pulsed and phased arrays.
The X-band radar frequency sub-bands are also utilized for civil, military and government functions, and these include weather tracking, air-traffic control, maritime vessel traffic control, defense surveillance and tracking, as well as detecting vehicle speed, which is a staple in law-enforcement circles.
In modern radars, the shorter wavelengths of the X-band also allow for higher resolution imagery, and one good example would be high-resolution imaging radars, which are used for both for civilian and military purposes.
What Are The Standard Capacities Of X-Band Bandpass Filters?
Band pass filters for the highly-specialized X-band vary, in terms of design and manufacturer. But in general, this type of filter performs one crucial function, which is to pass frequencies within a certain range, and reject or attenuate the frequencies which are outside that range.
In terms of technical capacity, X-band bandpass filters have an estimated passband rate of 7.25 GHZ to 8.4 GHZ , a passband insertion loss of 05 dB max, and a rejection from 7.9 GHZ to 84 GHZ of 100 dB min. The numbers however, vary from one x-band filter to another.
Apart from satellite communications, the X-band is also the haven for amateur radio operators, especially in the frequency range of 10.000 to 10.500 GHZ, and amateur satellite operators are allowed to work in the 10.450 to 10.500 GHz range.
The X-band also work in other aspects, such as in traffic-management, where motion detectors often utilize 10.525 GHz, while 1.4 GHz is being proposed for crossing detectors. Band pass filters for the X-band are also widely used on weather forecasting and atmospheric sciences, where they filter recent meteorological data with a period range of 3 to 10 days.
Thus, before cyclones, typhoons or tornadoes hit your hometown, the X-band band pass filters will likely have these anomalies detected (and their movements tracked in advance) so that you and your family will be forewarned, and you’ll have enough time to seek shelter!


Elizabeth "Molly" Page was born in Haverhill, New Hampshire, the daughter of the first Postmaster of New Hampshire. She married John Stark in 1758; they had eleven children.
What is now Vermont Route 9 between Brattleboro and New York State west of Bennington was the route taken by General Stark as he led his troops from present-day Charlestown, New Hampshire across Vermont to defeat the British in the Battle of Bennington in August 1777. To confuse the enemy, General Stark referred to the route they were taking as the "Molly Stark Trail" and it is identified as such on the official Vermont Highway Map.
Molly was both nurse and doctor to her husband's troops during a smallpox epidemic; her house functioned as a hospital. The Daughters of the American Revolution have a chapter named for her.
For not having done or said anything of any outstanding historic significance, she is honored with a dizzying array of schools, parks, streets and businesses of every description bearing her name.


Fore Abbey is the old Benedictine Abbey ruin, situated to the north of Lough Lene in Co Westmeath. Fore, Fobhar is the anglicised version of the Irish name that signifies “the town of the water-springs” and was given to the area after Saint Féchín’s spring or well, which is next to the old church a short distance from where the ruined monastery still stands. It was Saint Féchín who founded the ancient Fore Abbey around 630. By 665 (the time of the yellow plague) there were 300 monks living in the community.
Founder of the village’s Benedictine monastery during the seventh century, Féchín was a man of faith who influenced the surrounding area in seven miraculous ways, collectively known as the Seven Wonders of Fore. Sources for his life and legend include Irish annals, martyrologies, genealogies and hagiographical works.
Féchín is said to have been born in Bile, probably Billa in what is now the parish of Ballysadare (Kilvarnet), (Co Sligo). The medieval Lives call his mother Lassair, identified in the Irish text (first part) as a member of a royal Munster line. The late Irish Life asserts that the saint’s foundation at Fore in Mide was connected to the Luigne and that Féchín himself belonged to the Luigne of Connacht.
The Seven Wonders
1. The Monastery Built on the Bog: Fore Abbey, is considered one of the wonders. Its ruins constitute the only Benedictine site remaining in the entire country. Their strong presence and fortress-like appearance give the impression that the building, in its time, was more of a castle than a house of prayer. Legend says that it was built on a rock in the centre of a quaking bog. The ruins of the monastery represent only a small portion of St. Féchín’s achievements. Over the centuries, pilgrims have come to visit the sites and see evidence of the other ‘seven wonders’ that still exists today.
2. The Water that Flows Uphill: Saint Féchín was said to have used his staff to coerce water to flow uphill instead of down. The “uphill” flow of water is an optical illusion.
3. The Mill without a Race: Saint Féchín reportedly induced water to flow from the ground and operate a mill that had no visible water supply.
4. The Tree that has Three Branches/The Tree That Won’t Burn: Pilgrims place coins in it, giving it the name “the copper tree.”
5. Water that Does NOT Boil: Near the tree, you’ll see Saint Féchín’s Holy Well, now believed to be the site of a megalithic burial tomb, whose waters were locally reputed to heal the sick and cure various ills. Another legend said the water would never boil, and local tradition warned that misfortune would come to anyone who tried boiling it.
6. The Anchorite in a Cell: On the hill above Saint Féchín’s church, you can also visit a 15th-century tower. Also known as the Hermit’s Cell, the tower, now encased in a 19th century family mausoleum, once housed Patrick Beglin — the last “anchorite hermit” in Ireland. He entered this tiny cell to pray, and withdrew from society for religious reasons, relying on food and water brought to him by local supporters. He died in the cell, and is commemorated in a stone tablet in the cell dated 1616 AD.
7. The Stone Raised by Saint Féchín’s Prayers: Another wonder located nearby is in the ruins of a 12th Century Church, Saint Féchín’s Church, whose centre post, decorated by an ornate Greek cross carved into the stone, was said to rise into place by the power of Saint Féchín’s prayers alone.
Another important aspect of Fore is the Fore Crosses one of which is in the village of Fore. There are 18 crosses; some crosses are plain (most likely due to wind and rain erosion) whilst others still remain carved. These are spread out over 7 miles on roadways and in fields and bore witness to religious persecution during penal times.
Image | Fore Abbey, Co Westmeath | photo credit| Fiona MacGinty-O’Neill
#irishhistory #ireland #irelandinspires


Platinum Metals Rev., 1988, 32, (3), 118
Wiring Up Microelectronic Implants
Fine platinum and platinum-iridium wires, when insulated with silicone rubber, PTFE or a synthetic enamel, are suitable conductor materials for wiring up microelectronic implants, being neutral with regard to body tissues and the fluids they come into contact with. Of the possible ways of making connections to such wires, mechanical clamping is too clumsy, soldering is generally mechanically weak, while welding is inconvenient and may damage the wire; fortunately, a recent technical note from the Medical Research Council’s Neurological Prosthesis Unit describes a micro-brazing process which enables strong bonds to be made (“Technical Note: Microbrazing Fine Platinum Wires”, P. E. K. Donaldson, J. Med. Eng. Technol., 1988, 12, (1), 24–25).
Pure gold, in the form of a helix of 75μ m diameter wire, is threaded over the platinum wires to be joined and is then heated to a temperature between 1063 and 1755°C. This may be done in a variety of ways, and the circuit of a suitable micro-arc generator for forming the braze is given.


Last week, the 2018 AP Stylebook went on sale, and I gave you a peek at the guidance offered in its new “Polls and Surveys” chapter. This week, I highlight some of the Associated Press guidelines for writing accurately and dispassionately about another hot topic: immigration.
DREAM Act vs. DACA
The DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) is a legislative bill that has yet to pass through either the House or Senate. It proposes to grant conditional permanent resident status to immigrants who live in the United States illegally but who arrived in the U.S. when they were still children. Because it has not passed through Congress or been signed by the president, it is not a law and should not be referred to as such.
DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — does have the force of law, but it never went through Congress. It’s an administrative program (but not an executive order) enacted during the Obama administration that is similar to the proposals outlined in the DREAM Act. Although it does not grant resident status to anyone living in the United States illegally, it does protect certain young foreign nationals from deportation and permits them to work.
“Dreamers” is a term many people use to refer to those who stand to benefit from either DACA or the DREAM Act, but the Associated Press warns journalists to put the term in quotation marks in all uses, to use the term sparingly — it doesn’t exactly depict an unbiased attitude about immigration legislation — and, for balance, to include some wording outlining the opposition to DACA and the DREAM Act.
Immigrants, Migrants, Asylum-Seekers, and Refugees
It should be common practice by now never to use illegal to refer to a person. People can perform illegal acts, and the term should be reserved to describe acts, like illegal immigration — but there is no such thing as an illegal person. This means you should also avoid the too-common phrase illegal immigrant. The Associated Press also recommends avoiding the terms alien and undocumented, offering wordier but more accurate options like an immigrant living in or entering a country illegally or without permission.
Take care choosing words to describe someone who leaves their home for another country, because there are sometimes subtle differences in meaning:
- Immigrants come to live in a new country for many different reasons.
- Refugees, however, are forced to leave their homes because of persecution, war, political upheaval, or natural disasters. In some cases — especially in the aftermath of a natural disaster — referring to a refugee as an immigrant may be misleading because immigrant is often understood to refer to someone looking for a long-term change of location and even new citizenship, whereas a refugee may simply be temporarily displaced.
- Asylum-seekers are those who have applied for asylum status. Some refugees are asylum-seekers, and some asylum-seekers are refugees, but the two terms are not interchangeable.
- Migrant is a more general term. It normally describes, to quote the AP Stylebook, “people who move from place to place for temporary work or economic advantage” — hence migrant worker — but it can also be used to describe people whose reasons for moving are unclear or to encompass a group that includes immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers.
When possible, more specificity is usually preferred to tell the whole story — “civilians fleeing the violence in Gondor,” for example, instead of “refugees from Middle-earth.”
Chain Migration (Avoid It)
The AP recommends avoiding the phrase chain migration unless it occurs in a quotation. It’s a loaded term for a longstanding U.S. program, officially called family-based immigration, that gives preference in immigration decisions to people who have relatives who are already U.S. citizens or legal residents.
To reiterate, family-based immigration is a current program of the U.S. State Department and not, as it sometimes seems in the news, an illegal or dubious scheme concocted by the immigrants themselves. Especially in stories where accusations are flying, that fact may need to be clarified for readers who only know what they hear from the people they already agree with.


Transport Engineering Assignment Help
Transport engineering or transport engineering is the use of technology and scientific principles to the preparation, practical design, operation and management of facilities for any manner of transfer as a way to provide for the secure, efficient, fast, comfortable, convenient, economic, and environmentally harmonious motion of people and goods (transport). This is a sub-area of industrial engineering and of civil engineering. Transportation engineering is an important part of the civil engineering and mechanical engineering according to specialization of academic classes and primary competencies of the concerned terrain.
The planning aspects of transportation engineering entail political variables and
specialized forecasting conclusions, and link to urban planning. Specialized forecasting of passenger journey generally entails an urban transportation planning model requires the estimation of trip generation, trip distribution, mode choice, and route assignment. More advanced forecasting may contain other aspects of voyager choices including auto possession, trip as well as the selection of residential or company place. Since they frequently represent the pinnacle of demand on any transportation system, passenger excursions are the focus of transportation engineering.
A review of descriptions of the extent of varied committees suggests that while facility planning and design continue to be the center of the transportation engineering discipline such areas as operations planning, logistics, network analysis, funding, and policy evaluation are also vital that civil engineers especially to those working in highway and urban transport.
Transportation engineering as practiced by civil engineers mostly needs for planning, design, building, maintenance, and operation of transport facilities. The facilities support air, highway, railway, pipeline, water, and sometimes even space transport. The design aspect of transportation engineering comprises the sizing of transport facilities as well as discovering the material and depth of the roadway.
Before any preparation happens the Engineer must select if it is suitable or what is called an inventory of the region, the last system set up. This inventory or database must contain information on:
(2) Land use
(3) Economic Action
(4) Transport facilities and services
(5) Traveling patterns and volumes
(6) Laws and ordinances
(7) Regional financial resources
(8) Community values and expectations.
These inventories help business models are created by the engineer to finish precise predictions of the future states of the review system.
Direction and operations need for traffic engineering so that vehicles go easily on trail or the road. Older techniques include tolling, signals, markings, and signs. Newer technologies include intelligent transportation systems including advanced traveler information systems such as changeable message signs, complex traffic control systems that include ramp meters and vehicle infrastructure integration. Human variables are a feature of transportation engineering especially concerning driver-vehicle interface and user interface of signals, road signs, and mark.
Transportation engineers design, plan and manage the substantial public and private infrastructure systems that link our real world.
We constantly evolve in a large scale transportation infrastructure that includes railway, road, air and water. Transportation engineers quantify and optimize our freedom infrastructure networks to match cargo and travel demands while ensuring security, equity and sustainability at minimal rates of price and congestion.
Transport engineering has ever been among the crucial civil engineering areas, affecting roadways, bridges, transit stations, airports and sea ports etc. Transportation engineering has grown into a multidisciplinary area crossing politics, economics, sociology and psychology, along with the mathematical engineering and computational principles.
Transportation preparation needs for developing mathematical techniques for:
discovering progress to the transportation infrastructure
Computational transportation preparation uses mathematical techniques signify to identify and quantify:
The development of land use in cities
Travel credits including trip function
Traveling choices including mode choice.
Intending models subsequently analyze the feasibility of policies and projects through cost-benefit and scenario analysis.
Transportation engineers face multifaceted design choices when they may be designing optimized transportation infrastructure networks.
The real growth of transportation facilities including the amount of lane width for a roadway
The material and depth used in roadway
The geometry of a facility such as airport, railway or roadway
Deploy information-based technology
In all design decisions, price metrics, multiple performance measures and security standards should be considered and weighed.
Transportation operations whether for port, railway, road or air traffic were created to minimize journey delays, improve security, reduce emissions and enhance dependability, in addition to take other factors into consideration.
Transportation operation determinations entail:
— Design markings and traffic signs


"Some advocates say using sign language speeds up verbal development and enhances early brain development" ... Lindy Alexander
As parents, we inevitably have times when we can’t decipher what our young child wants or needs. Children are great communicators, but their language development usually means that their verbal ability is months behind what they can actually understand. This can lead to frustration (yours and theirs!) when they can’t let you know what they want, how they feel, or what they are thinking.
In recent years, the idea of teaching sign language to children – even if they can hear – has risen in popularity. Some advocates say using sign language speeds up verbal development and enhances early brain development, while some parents report that hearing children who have learnt to sign experience less frustration (and therefore fewer tantrums). Some studies have shown that signing children have better working memory. Overall, thought, the research is conflicting.
Typical language development
From the time they’re born (and even before they’re born), children are exposed to language. Receptive language develops before expressive language, which means that infants and toddlers can’t say as much as they understand.
Young children begin pointing to objects and people from around 10 months, and advocates of baby sign say this is the perfect time to begin using sign language with your child.
Reported benefits of signing with babies
Signing is said to be easier for babies and infants to learn because it relies on gross motor skills, rather than fine motor skills, such as those required for speech.
Over 20 studies have been conducted on parents using sign language with their children. Most of this research reported that young children who were exposed to sign language had accelerated language development. It’s important to note, however, that some were based on hearing children with signing, hearing-impaired parents; this is a big factor when you consider that most parents who want to sign with their children won’t necessarily sign fluently. Other studies were based on very small samples (some with just one infant).
Two notable studies, however, did find a link between use of sign language and rate of vocabulary development. These studies found that at 24 months, toddlers who used sign language at home were talking more like 28-month-olds; at 36 months, they were almost a full year ahead of their peers.
While a lot more research needs to be done in this area, it’s clear from the studies that either way, signing definitely doesn’t hinder children’s verbal development.
Although it has been called a “miracle fix” and “the answer to every exhausted parent’s prayers”, it’s important to know that while many signs seem to use ‘commonsense’ (for example, the sign for ‘drink’ is pretending to hold a cup and drink out of it), learning to sign isn’t necessarily easy. Perhaps surprisingly, sign language is not based on spoken language, and has its own grammar and structure. Of course this isn’t a big deal if you’re only learning a few words, but if you’re hoping to master the language and sign fluently, you may need to take this into consideration!
If you’re thinking about signing with your baby, be aware that many of the educational resources don’t use Australian Sign Language (Auslan) – they instead use American Sign Language (ASL), which is very different. But again, this probably isn’t a problem if you only want to use the signs within your family.
I don’t have a hearing loss, but am fluent in Auslan. I must admit, though, that signing with my 16-month-old son has been anything but fluent.
I had grand plans of bringing him up in a bilingual household, but consistently using sign language in the early days took too much energy.
Recently I’ve found more time to use signs with my son – I just incorporate it as we read books or go about our day – and I’ve been surprised at how quickly and easily he has picked it up. He now has over 25 signs he can use for all kinds of things: animals, foods, feelings, and concepts like hungry, more and finish.
I’m not using sign language to try and increase his intelligence, or to give him a head start. Rather, signing gives me an insight into my son that I wouldn’t have had until much later. For example, when he signs ‘hungry’ I can be sure what he means, rather than guessing.
Of course, just as a child learning to speak may say ‘hopspital’ instead of hospital, there can be confusion with sign. Many signs look similar, especially with a toddler’s chubby little hands. It can be tricky to know whether my son is just clapping his hands or signing ‘truck’. But this is all part of the fun – and isn’t this what language looks like when it’s emerging? Messy but wonderful!


SDS (sodium dodecyl sulfate/sulphate) is an anionic detergent effective in both acidic and alkaline solutions. SDS has a wide variety of applications, but is most often used in protein and lipid solubilisation.
- highly flammable
- harmful in contact with skin and if swallowed
- irritating to eyes, respiratory system and skin
- water solubility: 250g/l at 20ºC
SDS solubilisation of biomolecules
As a rule of thumb for the solubilisation/solubilization of proteins, SDS should be used at its critical micelle concentration (Womack'83 PMID 6882760). For the effects of SDS on protein conformation see Protein Structure by Creighton . For comparisons between SDS and other detergents for solubilisation of lipids, proteins, and its effect on enzymes activity see Womack '83 (PMID 6882760) and Creighton Protein Structure.
Critical micelle concentration CMC of SDS
CMC of SDS varies with pH. It is about 0.01 mol/L (M) for pH 5-10. At more acidic pH the CMC drops off to about 0.07M at pH 2 (Rahman Brown '83 ).
Stability & Storage
SDS undergoes hydrolysis at higher temperatures especially in acidic medium. Prolonged heating at >40°C causes decomposition of alkyl sulphates into fatty alcohols and sodium sulphate.
Use an ion retardation columns to remove SDS from protein samples. Retardation Resin. For SDS removal methods see Kapp'78 (PMID 9762103) and similar papers . Methylene blue can be used to determine the remaining amount of SDS.


According to a new analysis by a theoretical physicist from UC Berkley and a radio astronomer from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard University, our Sun, as well as every other Sun-like star in the universe, had a twin when it was born.
The new assertion is based on a radio survey of a giant molecular cloud filled with recently formed stars in the constellation Perseus, and a mathematical model that can explain the Perseus observations only if all Sun-like stars are born with a companion. Scientists ran a series of statistical models to see if they could account for the relative populations of young single stars and binaries of all separations in the Perseus molecular cloud, and the only model that could reproduce the data was one in which all stars form initially as ‘wide binaries.’ These systems then either shrink or break apart within a million years.
[In this study, ‘wide’ means that the two stars are separated by more than 500 astronomical units, or AU, where one AU is the average distance between the Sun and Earth - 150 million km. A wide binary companion to our Sun would have been 17 times farther from the Sun than its most distant planet today, Neptune.]
Based on this model, the Sun’s sibling most likely escaped and mixed with all the other stars in our region of the Milky Way galaxy, never to be seen again. The conclusion is that Sun-like stars are not primordial, they are the result of the breakup of binaries.
Readers may also be interested in an associated blog on the ‘Sun’s family:’
Sources/Reference: Source: UC Berkeley. Reference: "Embedded Binaries and Their Dense Cores" - Sarah Sadavoy, Steven W. Stahler - Submitted on April 28, 2017 - Accepted in MNRAS - ArXiv server
Credit for image at top of page: Bill Saxton, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NRAO/AUI/NSF