Jonathan Fields

So there's a particular kind of loneliness that tends to hit in the middle of a full life.

Not because you're isolated, but because the relationships that used to hold you steady, they're just all being renegotiated, often all at once.

The kids have left, a parent has passed, a marriage needs new terms.

We need ways to process these moments, rituals.

And yet the very rituals that help people move through moments like this for 10,000 years have largely vanished forever.

and very little has replaced them.

Bruce Feiler is a seven-time New York Times bestselling author.

In this conversation, he walks us through why rituals matter and how to design your own rituals for the moments that no existing ceremony really knows how to hold anymore.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

And the place I want to start with Bruce is a feeling that he described that I never heard named quite the way that he names it before.

We'll jump right in after this short break.

You and I have talked a number of times over the years.

You spent about three years or so visiting, if I remember correctly, 26 different countries, participating in 100 or something different ceremonies.

But I want to start a little bit closer to home.

In the introduction of A Time Together, you write about walking through your own front door after dropping your daughters off at college and feeling – I think these are kind of your words – homesick in your own home.

And it's like I knew exactly what you meant.

Even though my circumstances are different, everyone joining us is going to have a different circumstance.

What is the thing that you discovered in those first few weeks that made you realize –

Oh, this is the feeling.

And this also is not a private problem or feeling.