When the Next Chapter Arrives Uninvited

Ooph the world just gets tougher. 

I have been helping people handle complexity—and the stressful uncertainty that comes along with it—for basically my entire career. I’ve been teaching leaders how to dance with complexity, how to use the activation of it, the force of it, the possibilities inherent in it to create a better tomorrow.

But how do we dance with this reality? The world out there doesn’t encourage me to dance—it encourages me to climb under my covers and cry. This is not the most helpful response to complexity. (Though sometimes it is the most understandable.)

Right now the tools I teach seem very far away. And I’m aware that when it’s the hardest, that’s when I most need to pull those tools out. I’m writing this blog as a reminder to myself. If it helps you too, even better.

It feels to me like we are collectively on a cusp of a new chapter. You know this—AI, wars, political swirl, climate weirdness—all of this adds up to a context in the future that is really different than the context of the past. Not a little different. The next chapter is arriving whether we’re ready or not.

William Bridges spent decades studying how humans move through transitions, and the thing he said that has stayed with me longest is this: all transitions begin with an ending. With grief. It doesn’t matter whether you chose the change or the change chose you—something has to be let go before something new can be found. We tend to want to skip this part. We want to get to the new beginning, the hopeful part, the part where we know what we’re doing again. But Bridges was right. The grief is the doorway.

So: we’re grieving. You might want to climb into bed and cry too. Bridges says that’s natural; that’s what humans do when something real is ending.

But Bridges also reminds me that at this point in a transition it can feel like grief is the only story. He urges us to remember that we are more than our grief. And this is where I want to offer something practical, because I’ve been thinking about what it actually takes to co-author your next chapter—not just be dragged into it, but to bring some of yourself, your intentions, your agency into what comes next. I think it takes (at least) four things.

Space. Physical, emotional, temporal. Room to think, to feel, to not-know for a bit. This is the first thing the world steals from us when things get hard. We get busy, reactive, frantic. Protecting some space—even small amounts—is an act of resistance and of authorship.

Company. People who will challenge you and support you and simply hold you. The next chapter is not a solo project. We need witnesses to our becoming, and people brave enough to ask us hard questions. We need the safety of being loved even as we ourselves feel lost.

Inspiration. A sense of what’s possible. Hope, even partial, even uncertain. Not toxic positivity—not pretending things are fine when they aren’t—but the genuine capacity to imagine a future worth moving toward. This can be the hardest one for me right now, and therefore the most important to tend deliberately.

Serendipity. This one surprises people. But next chapters rarely arrive through pure planning. They arrive through the unexpected conversation, the book you picked up for no reason, the connection you didn’t see coming. Creating conditions for serendipity—saying yes to things, being in motion, staying curious—is its own skill.

None of this is easy when the world is on fire. In fact, every single one of these gets harder under duress: space gets invaded, company gets scattered, inspiration feels almost indecent, and serendipity starts to look like randomness. I have been struggling to even write about this because I don’t want it to look trite. I don’t think it’s trite; I think it’s tricky. And that we need it. 

So I’d love to learn from you: what is helping you find your way to a better tomorrow? How are you finding space, company, inspiration, and serendipity? Or maybe you’re finding something that I don’t even know to look for. Let’s be company for each other right now and talk about what’s keeping you moving forward.