I’m working on my book Project Empty Nest, about the empty-nest transition—a transition that I’m rebranding as the “open-door” transition.

I love quotations, so one of my favorite parts of writing a book is choosing the epigraphs. For this book, the book as a whole has two quotations as epigraphs, and each chapter has its own epigraph, as well.

The epigraph for chapter one comes from E. B. White’s essay “The Ring of Time”:

The only sense that is common, in the long run, is the sense of change—and we all instinctively avoid it, and object to the passage of time, and would rather have none of it.

Our resistance to change, and the value of change, is a tension that comes up again and again in my study of happiness.

Here’s a funny and true example of how change—even when we resist it and complain about it—sometimes brings value.

For two days in February of 2014, workers on London’s underground network went on strike, and as a result, some (but not all) Tube stations were closed. Many people were forced to change their daily commute to work, to find a different path for getting from their home to their office and back.

Travel patterns during this time were studied closely, and researchers found something interesting: about one in twenty commuters stuck with their new route even after the strike ended. In fact, researchers concluded that in the end, there was a net benefit of time saved: the time saved in the long term by those who found a more efficient way to get to work outweighed the time lost by commuters during the forty-eight hours of the strike.

When we’re forced to do things differently, we often find a better way. But we usually don’t try those changes very willingly!

This is a very apt observation for the empty-nest/open-door stage of life. Whether we welcome this transition or not, it can nevertheless be a time of positive change, if we approach it mindfully.