If you’ve never experienced labor, then you have not had the singular experience of going through transition. But transition is the best metaphor for what I am feeling right now, so let me try to explain. Maybe some of you can relate.

Transition is the period of labor starting when the woman’s cervix approaches maximum dilation and ending when pushing begins. 

You have a hole between the inside and outside of your body big enough to fit a man’s fist or, incidentally, a baby’s head through. If you’ve ever gotten a big cut and gotten woozy just thinking about how there’s a hole in your body, you have an inkling of how this feels. The body knows it is vulnerable. Blood is rushing to the critical areas. Nausea and vertigo are not uncommon. 

You feel – both trapped and exposed. What happens next is critical and you are completely out of control of the situation. You can’t push yet. You have to wait. 

You have to breathe through minutes that feel like hours as you sit with the uncomfortable feeling that your body is about to turn inside out. You want to run away, but there’s nowhere to go and the panic only makes you feel worse. You can’t go back. You can’t hurry forward. You just have to let your body do what it has to do in order to bring forth new life. 

Your time to work is coming, and the work will be hard and painful. But this, right here and now, might be the hardest part of all, because there is nothing at all you can do to make things better. All your striving to fix the situation only makes things worse. 

The only thing you can do is allow the vulnerability, the discomfort, the disorientation, to carry you through on their unpredictable waves to the place you need to be to start working. 

Now is the time to wait, and be, and trust. When it is time to start the work there will be no doubt as to what to do. 

Let the transition do its work.