Create Harmony

Honoring Who You Were, Welcoming Who You'll Become

• Sally

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Transitions mark the rhythm of our lives, yet we rarely give them the attention they deserve. Whether it's a career change, a child leaving home, or simply turning another year older, these pivotal moments reshape who we are and how we experience the world.

Sally Burlington opens up about watching her oldest daughter prepare to graduate college—a significant milestone triggering waves of emotion for everyone involved. As her daughter swings between enthusiastic anticipation and nostalgic reflection, Sally finds herself confronting her own evolving identity. What does it mean to transition from parenting younger children to guiding adult offspring? How do we honor who we've been while embracing who we're becoming?

The episode reveals a transformative practice for navigating transitions with grace: taking intentional time to bid farewell to your former self before welcoming the new version emerging through change. "I'm going to say goodbye to this person and I'm going to welcome in this new person," Sally explains, describing how this simple ritual helped her process complex emotions around transition. Rather than rushing through change with a hyper-focus on to-do lists, this practice invites us to acknowledge our feelings and honor both what was and what will be.

If you're navigating any kind of transition in your life—from the monumental to the mundane—this episode offers a gentle framework for approaching change with mindfulness and meaning. Listen now, and discover how reframing transitions might bring unexpected peace to life's inevitable changes.

To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com

Speaker 2:

You've just joined the Create Harmony podcast. This is a place where we use our imagination as a way of listening to God and we tune our senses to the magical presence of the Holy Spirit. We shift our focus from chaos and conflict back to everyday joys and meaningful connections with those around us. You can find your place here, and while you're doing that, you might also find some peace. So this is episode 123, and I'm your host, sally Burlington, and for today's topic, we are going to talk about transitions.

Speaker 2:

So transitions happen all the time. We transition from a new job to an old job, to a new job, or usually you don't go the other way around Old job to a new job. We might move to a new house, to a new place, a new city. Sometimes we have the loss of a family member or a loved one, which is a transition, an unwelcome transition. Sometimes we just have a big birthday and that's a big transition. We're transitioning from one decade to another. Even those little things, even on a more micro level. Transitions happen all the time, and this has really been on my mind lately because we're getting ready to have a big transition in our family, because our older daughter is getting ready to graduate from college and start, you know, her new adult life. So both watching her make the transition has a lot of feelings and experiencing that transition ourselves my husband and I ourselves have brought up a lot of different emotions and feelings and I'm just sort of sorting them out and thinking about them and just processing them some.

Speaker 2:

Now, when I look at her, what I see is a girl who is excited and who's enthusiastic about her next steps. Her plan right now is to have a summer internship in a new city and that's exciting and she's just optimistic about all the things she's going to learn and the people that she's going to meet and the experiences she's going to have. But she's also very uncertain because making a big transition like that there's a lot of uncertainty. There are many, many unknowns, so much to learn. She's really having to tap into beginner's mind and that's all happening at the same time that she's sort of closing a chapter. She's moving away from the city where she went to college, many of her friends are spreading out to lots of different places, and so connections with close friends and people that she's cared about teachers all of those things are drawing to a close and she has days when I talk to her I can tell she has days when she's got a little bit of senioritis and she's just ready to go and just frustrated and irritated and a little bit bound to where she is. And then she has days where she's just very nostalgic and very, you know, has a lot of sweet and positive feelings about all the great things that have happened to her over the last four years while she's been in college. So seeing her go through all of that there's a lot of feelings to seeing her do that and watching her branch out and thrive is really exciting.

Speaker 2:

But I feel like I also want to acknowledge my own transition here, my husband and I as her parents. It's exciting to see this big change happen, but I'm also experiencing a transition that I'm no longer going to be the mother of younger children or even a college-age daughter. I'll have one daughter in college, but the other one will be an adult and that is a transition for me as well, as I'm going through some other transitions in my work life and in my own life. I'm studying to become a spiritual director and I'm learning a lot and meeting new people and just being reshaped in so many new ways and, as we talked about last week, we just did a major renovation of our backyard and you know, even on a small scale, that's a transition of where we live and how we live and just all of the exciting opportunities that are awaiting us and things, how things change, just the way that I see myself, the way that I feel about myself, just it's.

Speaker 2:

It's one of those times where you're really evaluating a lot. Now you might be in a completely different life phase, you might not have any children or you might have a completely different kind of life, but my guess is you have experienced some transition of some sort. Like I said before, you've experienced the loss of a job or a new opportunity, or you've taken up a new hobby or you've gotten a new dog. I mean, you're making some sort of changes, some sort of transitions, and one of the things I caught myself doing I'm wondering if you have a tendency to do this too is I caught myself really focusing on my to do list and, like on the actions, the doing of it I always tend to do that Instead of the being of it and the feelings like just noticing my feelings and acknowledging them was really healing for me.

Speaker 2:

It helped me release some of the stress that I was holding, because I think I was maybe not wanting to recognize that I had feelings about things drawing to a close, or that I had feelings of uncertainty about what was ahead and therefore I was busying around and maybe that wasn't the best path forward for me. So I discussed this process with my spiritual director and she told me about a practice that I thought was really helpful and I wondered if it would help you too. She urged me to take the time, take the time and energy, like a pause, to say goodbye to the person that I had been during this phase. You know, as you're letting go of that person, just say goodbye to that person, thank that person for all of the good things that you've experienced together and all the learning and the growing and the knowing of that that you, and then take time to welcome the new person that I was becoming Like, invite that new person in, welcome her and greet her with glee and happiness and say I'm glad to see you and I'm excited about what we're going to experience together, and sort of thinking about it that way. That was pretty healing for me. I really liked the visual of like I'm going to say goodbye to this person and I'm going to welcome in this new person, so that I even wrote about it in my journal. You could, you could write it out if that helps you think more deeply about it. So you might try that any on any transition that you're making, if you are going to leave your old job and start a new job, you might say the person that worked this job had these experiences and I'm going to let that person go. I'm going to say goodbye to him or her and then I'm going to welcome the new person that's going to be working this new job and learning these new skills and meeting these new people and I'm going to be excited about that and it just sort of helps you bridge the transition a little bit more smoothly. So for our closing today, I'm going to read to you a liturgy written by Kate Bowler from her book have a Beautiful, terrible Day, and it's called Letting Go is so Painful and it goes like this I have tried to keep, preserve place between tissue paper, seal into frames everything precious.

Speaker 2:

I have tried to repair, replace everything broken. I am cataloging memories with an archivist eye. Nothing will chip or stain or be misplaced somewhere at someone's house and be forgotten altogether. Nothing will slip away, lord, I could not bear to lose any more than what's already gone. But then, god, the children wiggle out of favorite clothes with each passing year. There are those boxes of grandma's things in the attic. He left and she's gone, and my closets are stuffed to the ceiling with reminders.

Speaker 2:

We are losing the life we knew. We are gaining a life we didn't imagine. We are picking up and putting down. So let's take the china out of the cupboard, the basketball gloves out of the garage or whatever tells our story and tell it. We will not be lost. We will never be lost. Thanks so much for joining us today as we considered what it was like to make a transition and we thought about all the different types of transitions in our lives. Hopefully, you were able to think about some sort of transition you're making, even if it's a smaller transition, and maybe you were able to reframe that in a slightly different way. I hope that's my hope for you. I hope you'll come back next week as well and we continue the conversation about everyday joys and counting our blessings. And until next time, peace.

Speaker 1:

Thank you.

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Sally Burlington

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