Introduction

       I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered Don’t have a friend who feels at ease Don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered Or driven to its knees.

      —Paul Simon, “American Tune”

      All of us find ourselves, at one time or another in our lives, facing the unexpected. We arrive at places we never planned to be, confronting obstacles we did not expect to encounter, feeling emotions we did not expect to feel. We don’t recognize the destination at which we find ourselves as one we chose to travel to, yet, inexplicably, there we are. Somehow our plan for how we intended things to turn out seems to have been replaced by a set of circumstances we could never have imagined, let alone wished for:

      Or perhaps a moment comes when we see our life as it really is instead of seeing it as we want it to be. To our great dismay, we realize that it is time for a change:

      What is happening? We are standing face to face with what amounts to a gap—the gap between where we thought we’d be and where we actually are, between our expectations of what we hoped would happen and what has actually happened, between the life we planned and the life we inhabit.

      What makes these moments so difficult and disturbing is not simply that we are facing problems or emotionally rough times. Each of us has braved, battled and survived many challenges in our lives. What’s different about these particular experiences is that along with the pain there is a sense of bewilderment, a sort of shock, a disconnect between what we thought we knew to be true and what is actually occurring. We feel as if we are waking up as a stranger in our own lives. We don’t recognize the landscape, the emotions, the circumstances as anything vaguely resembling those things we had expected. And so we find ourselves asking: “How did I get here?” No immediate answer comes to us. It is the presence of this question and the absence of answers that plunges us headfirst into a spiritual and emotional crisis.

      “Last month my husband told me he wants a divorce. After fifteen years of marriage, it’s over. I can’t believe I am losing him, that our family is being torn apart. The house, our friends and the life we built—it’s all going to vanish. I am so furious at him for destroying my dream. What am I supposed to do now? How can this be happening to me? How did I get here?”

      “I’ve been dreading going to work for a while now, and I finally admitted the truth to myself: I’m miserable because I hate what I do for a living. I don’t understand how this can be happening—I spent years in medical school studying to be a doctor, and I have a really successful practice. This is what I planned to do since I was a teenager, and I’m good at it. But I just don’t want to do it anymore. I’m really frightened—I can’t start over at fifty-six with two kids in college. How did I get here?”

      “I just bought my first house, but it’s thrown me into a deep depression—I’m forty-two years old and still single, and here I am living alone in this beautiful home. This is not the way things were supposed to turn out for me.