Endings, Neutral Zones, and New Beginnings: Why 2026 Feels Different
- PG Geldenhuys
- 30 minutes ago
- 5 min read
There’s a specific emotional whiplash that comes with watching your child step into a new chapter. AJ is off to Jan van Riebeeck Primary School next year. “Big” school, broader horizons, and all that wide-eyed excitement only a six-year-old can summon before he even knows what awaits him. It’s pure joy, framed by parental anxiety if we can keep up with the pace (which is hectic, I’m told). But joy tends to drag its shadow behind it. His new beginning means our ending at Huppelland, the preschool that shaped not only him but us. Four years of campouts, friendships, routines, and gentle rituals. It feels familiar, this saying goodbye. Varsity, London, my career in travel, my stint in the US. And now, with my life and location mostly predictable, I am reliving the loss and excitement of new chapters through my children.
There are other transitions afoot. My mom’s health has taken a downturn, and as she has been a constant my whole life, the spectre of being without her looms large. That unsettled feeling of being the sandwich generation sits heavy: children running ahead, parents slowing down, and you trying to stretch your emotional bandwidth across both ends of the timeline.
Also, in business, I closed down a legacy company, opened a new investment vehicle, shifted my coaching practice into a more intentional structure, and at the end of this month, we will say farewell to Abby after five years of extraordinary partnership. Yet in a neat twist of cosmic humour, I get to welcome back a familiar face in Caren for her third round, helping me build. People weave in and out of your life with surprising timing.
Even nature is playing along. The shift from spring into summer always brings a dose of irritation for me, mostly from pesky hay fever. It is juxtaposed with longer days, time at the beach, and dusting off the road bike. Caroline is facing her own transitions as a woman in her late 40s, on physical, emotional and professional fronts. And through all of this motion, I’m struck by a very particular intuition about what lies ahead.
I’ve always had a thing for the number 26 - a roulette-table superstition that’s followed me since varsity days. It’s a lucky number, I’m sure. And it feels even larger than Sun City now. 2026 is starting to look like a symbolic hinge year. A moment where things, maybe for the first time in a long time, start to move in the right direction. For our family. For my work. And - dare one whisper it - for South Africa.
William Bridges describes transitions as having three phases: an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning. It’s not just a personal model… it scales all the way up to nations. And right now, South Africa is the best macro-example of this pattern.
Apartheid formally ended in 1994, but the old economic model only really met its final breath around 2014. For two decades after democracy, the country grew at an average of 3% a year; per-capita income rose 40%; investment flourished. Then the wheels locked. The Zuma era well and truly did its destructive work. The energy crisis deepened, governance slipped, corruption hollowed out institutions, and growth collapsed to about 0.7% over the next decade. That was the ending, as politicians on the inside feasted, the country suffered. The result was institutional failure, economic stagnation, and the erosion of what had worked.
It's called the neutral zone, and it is the messy middle: the old system no longer works, the new one hasn’t kicked in. We lived in that fog for roughly ten years. Ports jammed. Trains rusted. Load-shedding felt permanent. Policy drifted. Confidence broke. And yet, within the decay, small experiments began. Reform teams were set up. Energy markets cracked open. Logistics maps were redrawn. Business and government edged, awkwardly, into collaboration. In Bridges’ language, this is the twilight stage where identity rewrites itself. Painful, but necessary.
Now we’re seeing green shoots. Slow, small, faint... but real. Electricity availability improving. Port backlogs shrinking. Regulatory bottlenecks easing. International investors creeping back. Local business leaders stepping into the arena with a different posture: not adversarial, but contributory. The decline seems to have bottomed out. The first gears of a new story are catching. Yes, the view from the ground is still stark. But on a big-picture level, and that’s where I try to encourage my business clients to look, the numbers are positive. The Flywheel, as per Jim Collins, is not yet moving with momentum… but a lot of people are putting shoulder to it to get it moving.
And this is where your number 26 makes poetic sense. If the last decade was the neutral zone, then 2026 is the logical year for the country’s new beginning. Not fireworks. Not miracles. But the first more confident turns of the flywheel: The heavy, grinding, initial momentum that signals a chapter shift. A year where hope becomes something sturdier: traction.
We saw it with the Boks. The 2019 World Cup wasn’t a miracle; it was a transition completed. Ending: the collapse of the previous system. Neutral zone: Rassie’s rebuild, based on trust relationships with Siya and others he had cultivated in almost a decade of other roles. New beginning: a team that rediscovered its identity and could play with clarity and purpose. Or, if you’re looking for a fan favourite movie metaphor, think of The Shawshank Redemption, and the tunnel that took years to build in the shadows, but finally served as the pathway to freedom.
PG’s Pro Tip:
If you’re in a transition, and you almost certainly are, here’s the play that works.
Name the ending. People can’t move until they know what they’re leaving behind. Write down what’s actually finished: roles, seasons, stories, expectations.
Build anchors for the neutral zone. When everything feels in-between, you need structure. One morning ritual, one weekly reset, and one person who hears the unedited version of your thinking.
Sketch the first steps of your new beginning. Not a full plan. Just the first three moves. Momentum doesn’t come from certainty; it comes from motion.
ChatGPT prompt:
“I’m in a transition. Help me map my current ending, my neutral-zone uncertainties, and the first three steps of my new beginning using William Bridges’ framework. Then help me design one stabilising daily ritual for the in-between.”
Transitions are rarely comfortable, usually complicated, and often disguised as chaos. But they’re also the birthplace of everything new - in families, in work, and in nations. And if the signs are right, 2026 might just be the year we feel the wheel start to turn again.
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