Alert Intermissions

In an essay about how we change our opinions, novelist Nicholson Baker argues that most of the time, we are in some inconclusive phase of changing our minds about many things, without being consciously aware that we are doing so. Events intrude and interrupt, occasioning what he calls alert intermissions.^[4] Many stories of career change, like John’s, tell about such alert intermissions—moments when pivotal events catalyze change.

All of us hope for those moments and mistake them for coincidences or rare occurrences. In fact, we create alert intermissions. For starters, we pay attention to things that justify what we want to do. An event that is rated insignificant by one person can be infused with meaning for another. During a career transition, our sense of identity is fluid and shifting, and so are the frames we apply to our experience. People, places, and things that might have gone unnoticed before become significant if they serve the cause of our reinvention.

Alert intermissions test and shape our possible selves.^[5] They clarify possibilities by offering sharper, more vivid and concentrated versions of what we have been sensing day to day. By the time John went to see the astrologer, he knew he wanted to write; most certainly, there had been other moments—plenty of them—that might have revealed his creative side. Perhaps the consultation with the astrologer stood out because it also disclosed the battle of identities that was at the heart of his paralysis. Alert intermissions make us aware of forks in the road; they force us to choose one possible self over another. John’s episode identified the creative possible self as his favorite, crystallizing a compelling image of himself that was still in the formative stage. The writer in him, in turn, became a beacon for future choices.

Unexpected events often provoke insights that allow progress toward a solution after a period of being stuck.^[6] They allow us to reframe our stories. For John, the revelation was not that he should become a writer. It was that he could not live in two worlds and that he would have to come to terms with letting go of the old identity that was slowing him down. John had never stopped to challenge his basic assumption that he could maintain his old social and financial status while moving into a realm that would allow him greater artistic expression. The astrologer told him he had to choose. It had a big impact not because she revealed something he did not know (if that were the case, she could not have catalyzed a change) but because all the experiences he had been having suddenly made sense in this new light. That encounter lent coherence to all the bits of knowledge, information, and feelings he had yet to put together.

Events can have these crystallizing effects because they intrude and interrupt our daily routine, forcing us to step back. An active person by nature, John had filled every waking moment with his search for an escape route. The astrologer episode made him slow down, provoking the walk in the park in which he stepped back from his frenetic search to question what he really wanted in life. John’s insight did not come to him at work nor did it come during a particularly busy period. Moments of insight—the culmination of meaning in a brief time span—tend to occur when we change contexts, when we are relaxed, when we put aside our problem for a while, or when we are doing something out of character—in John’s case, going to an astrologer.

But such insights on their own cannot drive a career transition to its culmination. They have to be worked into a compelling story. Why? Because we define who we are by our life stories. And stories about change, by definition, require a “before” and “after.” Events are merely occasions for retelling, reworking, and reassembling our experiences. We are literally reinventing the past so that it flows into a future we desire. In John’s case, the astrologer episode gave him a dramatic moment around which he could construct a story that would explain his actions as he left the bank. Knowing the story gave him motivation and purpose.

Our stories are not only for private consumption. They also help others make sense of what may seem like nonsensical actions, such as quitting a prestigious job instead of hanging on for early retirement. Without a good story, it is harder to get others to help us change. Certainly John’s encounter with the astrologer had a dramatic quality, but he dramatized it further for his own purposes, to signal to himself and others that the time had come to make a change.

One of the most interesting things about reinvention stories is how much they change along the way. Since a good story is defined by a narrative structure—a beginning, a low point, a climax, and an ending—the end point helps determine the beginning and the low point.^[7] Knowing the end point tells us which events are relevant. For example, John’s experience in the bank’s canteen on his first day at work becomes telling in the context of his leaving the bank to do the very things he could not share with the peers he joined for lunch that day. Since we need to know the end point in order to craft a good story, alert intermissions tend to come late in the transition process.

Only when the end is in sight can we recognize a turning point. John’s defining moment came at age forty-four, four full years after he had been working at finding a way out. As Nicholson Baker writes, “We must not overlook sudden conversions and wrenching insights, but usually we fasten onto these only in hindsight, and exaggerate them for the sake of the narrative.”^[8] The truth is that, for John, insight came to a mind prepared by a period of what he described as very, very hard work to come up with alternatives to his banking career. As we explore below, the practice of making sense consists of three parts: taking advantage of the events of our lives to reconsider our selves, stepping back periodically to allow insight to jell, and using both the events and our interpretations of them to work and rework our story.