My daughter said something about transitions being hard.

We were walking into a sushi restaurant on her birthday, talking the way we often do about life and what we notice in it. I responded that transitions are natural, inherent in the human experience, and that we get two practice sessions every day — we wake to greet the day and we sleep beneath the moon and stars. Morning arrives and invites us into creation, movement, and connection. Evening comes and asks something entirely different: relaxation, restoration, recovery.

She looked at me with wide eyes and a bit of exasperation. “Yes, and those transitions are hard for me too!”

Sometimes she stays up too late reading because she is completely engrossed in a book. She is well aware the following morning will be rough. She knows she needs to sleep well in order to function. But she doesn’t want to stop reading. And when morning arrives, she struggles to wake and greet the day cheerfully because she wants more sleep.

I smiled with appreciation and nodded with understanding. These are the moments I adore as a parent — the very human struggles we face and tend to overlook, spoken aloud.

I have been thinking about that conversation ever since. She was spot-on. Something can be completely natural and also be quite challenging.

Maybe I had been thinking about transitions backwards for most of my life. Which led me to a question: how many times do we transition in a lifetime?

I started with the most obvious. Every morning we move from sleeping to waking; every evening, from waking to sleeping. Two transitions a day is 730 a year. Add the four seasonal crossings many of us experience and we are at 734. Add a birthday — the annual passage from one age into the next — and we are at 735. Over an 80-year lifetime, that is 58,800 transitions.

Which is a comically conservative number.

It doesn’t include leaving home and returning, the beginning and ending of work, being alone and joining other people, starting a meal and finishing one, departing on a trip and coming back. It doesn’t account for weekdays becoming weekends and weekends becoming Mondays. It leaves out adolescence, graduation, falling in love, marriage, parenthood, children leaving home, career changes, moves, menopause, retirement, and aging. It doesn’t include illness and recovery, or the all-encompassing grief that accompanies loss.

And it certainly doesn’t include the transitions no one else can see — changing your mind, outgrowing a belief, no longer wanting something you spent years pursuing, realizing someone isn’t who you thought they were, or realizing you aren’t who you thought you were. The cycles of forgiving, releasing, and beginning again.

I suspect the real number across a human lifetime is not in the tens of thousands but in the hundreds of thousands.

Yet we reserve the word transition for the ones we can easily identify. Divorce, retirement, a new job, a move, a birth, the death of someone we love. As though the rest of life happens on stable ground.

But what if it doesn’t? What if life itself is the transition, and stability is only the interval we perceive between them?

I am not the same woman who woke up yesterday morning. The difference is almost imperceptible, because one day rarely changes us enough to notice. But put 50 beside 40, or 40 beside 20. Put the person you are today beside the person who once believed she knew exactly what her life would become, and the transition becomes visible. We are continuously becoming while experiencing ourselves as continuous.

What has changed in you so slowly that you didn’t realize it was changing until you looked backward?

The natural world is constantly transitioning. Morning becomes afternoon, day becomes night, the tide comes in and goes out, the moon waxes and wanes. Summer becomes autumn and the leaves change color before they release their hold and fall. Seeds wait while fields lie fallow. The cycle of bloom, death, and decay prepares the ground for what will grow once conditions become amenable. Nature doesn’t seem particularly concerned with remaining what it was.

I am not attempting to romanticize change. Not every transition in nature is gentle — storms come, rivers flood, forests burn, trees fall. Birth itself can be violent. Nature isn’t teaching us that change should always be peaceful. It may be teaching us something else entirely: that transition is the mechanism of growth, of evolution, of life itself.

What fascinates me most is that nature gives transition something we rarely give it — time, space, and a threshold. Dawn doesn’t instantly become noon. Autumn doesn’t arrive one morning with every leaf simultaneously orange. There is an in-between, a period when something is no longer quite what it was and isn’t yet what it will become.

We treat that in-between as the part to hurry through, as though the real transition happens on either side of it. I am no longer convinced. The in-between is the transition.

Which returns me to the book. My daughter knows she needs to sleep. But she is still inside the story. She wants five more pages, another chapter, a little longer to extend the pleasure. Sleep requires her to relinquish something she is enjoying. And then morning makes its own demand: leave the warmth, leave the bed, leave sleep behind and begin.

Maybe that is what makes transitions hard. They require us to leave something. And sometimes the hardest things to leave are the things we love. A beautiful season ends as the next one emerges. A wonderful trip concludes with a flight home. Children grow up even when we would happily freeze certain versions of them forever. Relationships, bodies, and dreams change. We change.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether you are resisting where you are going, but whether you are grieving what you have to leave in order to get there.

Maybe our work isn’t to become people who never struggle with transition, but people who recognize the season they are in. Who allow themselves to inhabit the threshold. Who know when to hold on and when holding on has become resistance. Who trust that not knowing what comes next doesn’t mean they are lost.

So I am curious. What transition are you in right now? I mean the one sitting beneath what other people can see, the one you may not yet have words for. And what would change if, instead of trying to get through it as quickly as possible, you allowed yourself to be unfinished?

I keep returning to my daughter and her book. There she is, completely engrossed in a story she isn’t ready to leave. I understand that. I think most of us can relate. Sometimes the chapter we are in is wonderful. Sometimes we desperately want to know what happens next. Sometimes we are simply not ready to close the book.

But eventually night asks us to surrender the page. We close the cover. We turn out the light. We sleep.

And somehow, without any effort from us, morning comes. Our eyes open, and we begin again.