The Third Chapter

Much of the coping with discontinuity has to do with discovering threads of continuit. You cannot adjust to change unless you can recongize some analogy between your old situation and your new situation. Without that analoyg you cannot transfer learning. You cannot apply skills. If you recognize a problem that you've resolved before, in however different guise, you have a uch greater chance of soliving that problem in the new situation...In composing the Third Chapter, then, we need to create a narrative that seeks to discover and then emphasize the connectin, the similarties, the transpostions from one chapter to the next rather than one that underscores the death of one and the birth of the other ...unless you can find ways to relearn and recycle, you are left with the model of hittin gbottom and starting over. This is the model where you reach a certain point and you are converted, you are boren again, and you completely leave your old life behind...what is importnat is to use the experience up to now, the skills, the learning, to aproach the moment of transition with some memory of what has been learned before, adn therefore the knowledge of what new learning felt like(27-8)

Comment: This makes a lot of sense. There are no clean breaks or fresh starts at this point, which is as it should be. In a way, what is being advocated here is nothing more than the middle way.In fact, as I think about my writing projects, beginning with the current one on the China discussion group, they are in a way an attempt to bring the philosophical training into the world