Life Transitions Are Not Just Changes
On Relocation, Inner Positioning, and the Illusion of Arrival #
We often believe we are simply changing something in our lives. A new house. A new country. A new role.
From the outside, the transition appears complete. The logistics are settled. Life resumes.
And yet, something remains unresolved.
Many people describe this as a lack of belonging, motivation, or grounding. But structurally, something more precise is happening.
The external transition has been completed. The inner relocation has not.
This distinction matters.
A life transition is not only a change of circumstances. It is a relocation of inner reference — a shift in how meaning, authority, and identity are organized.
This is why so many people feel strangely absent after a move that was meant to improve their lives. They have arrived physically, but their internal coordinates are still oriented toward the previous context.
The metaphor of transplanting a tree is often used to describe this experience. But the critical moment is not the move itself.
It is whether the roots are allowed to reorganize.
Roots do not adjust automatically. They respond to soil, climate, pressure, and time. If the internal conditions do not support re-anchoring, the tree survives — but does not integrate.
This is where many transitions stall.
People attempt to “feel at home” by recreating familiar patterns, maintaining old identities, or waiting for belonging to arrive on its own.
But belonging is not produced by time alone. It emerges when an inner position shifts.
At this stage, the essential question is no longer: How do I adapt? but rather: **From where am I now living? **
Until that question is faced, the transition remains incomplete — no matter how successful it appears externally.
Life transitions are not invitations to become someone else. They confront us with something more demanding: the need to re-locate authority within ourselves.
Only from that re-location can genuine grounding occur. Not as comfort, but as coherence.