These days in particular, I’m spending a good amount of time playing what my dad has always called the what-if game. It’s this fun little thing I do when my neurosis gets the best of me – I sit around and create negative stories about things that could happen or could never happen.

This game is in TOTAL opposition to my dedication to thinking positively. And it’s also a TOTAL waste of time. So as of right now, I am swearing off the what-if game … at least for the rest of today. And hopefully tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, I’m not surprised this old habit of mine is rearing its ugly head now.  The word of the day is transition.  The other word is unemployment. So there are a lot of what ifs lurking about. A lot of question marks.

This Friday, I’ll end a nine-month stint as a contractor for an organization I have grown to love and had hoped to stay at. And more than that, I’ll be a leaving a community of co-workers I have grown to love, one that is comprised of some of my now closest friends in San Francisco.

I should also mention I don’t know where my next  paycheck is coming from.

Meanwhile, I’m job hunting, planning for the short-term, medium-term and long-term, and having nightly dreams about driving vehicles that aren’t equipped with working brakes. Apparently my subconscious has moved on from brakeless orange bicycles (see post no. 1 in this blog) and has now taken to driving fancy cars like Audis and Saabs. They ALL lack working brakes. The upside is that every time I wake up I find I have come out of the danger unscathed. Sometimes I even coast in my given vehicle until I can find a safe place to crash the car, and then the dent is always minor and I am always fine.

Still, I’d be lying if I said this transition is a comfortable place to be – in real life or in my dreams.

Interestingly enough, though, I’m not alone in this process.  Most of the people in my life are also going through some type of rapid change and  uncertainty. It has occurred to me that maybe this type of transition is always happening and I just don’t take notice often enough. Right now, for example, some of my friends have been laid off and are job hunting just like me, one is considering marriage, some are breaking up, another just sold her second novel – which, by the way, is pretty bad-ass. Others are weighing the pros and cons of grad school, and another of my friends is about to go into labor – like any minute – also a bad-ass move.

And if I take another step back, a big step,  it seems like it’s not just the people I know; it’s our whole country that is steeped in chaos and transition. Read the headlines, you can’t miss it. After eight years of building faulty infrastructure based on arrogance and greed, a collective shift is taking place. And maybe the current chaos is helping to clear out the old and make way for something new and strong and healthy. And maybe it’s true that the only way for real change to happen, the kind that means growth and evolution and all that, is for a certain amount of chaos to take hold. I’m not sure.

But for now, anyway, my next bold move consists of sitting tight and watching the chaos – both personal and collective – without getting caught in the undertow of what-ifs. I’m doing my best to learn from it, to keep my balance.  I don’t know where I’ll end up when this transition is complete, not that I ever do when I’m in transition, but accepting the uncertainty makes the process more palatable, and maybe even a little more exciting.

After all, where there’s nothing, there’s always the possibility of something.