The Excitement And Anxiety Of A New Start

Bill Holdar, a father of two in San Antonio, is starting a new chapter this month—this time for real.

He’s going back to work, after three years as a stay-at-home dad and one ill-fated attempt to return to his job as a teacher right before the pandemic hit. His 2-year-old daughter, Nora, recently wrapped up a year of chemotherapy treatment. She and her brother got vaccinated against Covid-19 this summer. The whole family is heading back into the world: school, daycare, a prekindergarten program.

“It’s all starting to get really different, really fast,” Mr. Holdar told me after watching Nora settle in next to her new classmates during circle time. He felt relief that normal life seemed to have arrived, and trepidation about the possibility of the kids getting sick or having trouble adjusting to an unfamiliar rhythm.

“I’ll definitely miss those other days,” he said of time spent at home doing arts and crafts or catching bugs with the kids on the trails out back. “But it’ll also be freeing.”

After some false starts, this fall is a moment of transition for many Americans. The halting, tenuous shifts of the last couple of years—half-empty offices and halfhearted return plans, kids home again thanks to another mandatory quarantine—are dwindling. We’re returning to our uninhibited lives, whether that means restarting old routines or taking the plunge on big life changes, with all the accompanying excitement and terror.

Lissa Jean Ferrell says she feels like she’s starting a second life. After two years in which school was disrupted for millions of American students, the lawyer and divorced mom finally saw all three of her daughters graduate this spring—the youngest from high school, the middle from college, and the oldest, a law student, belatedly celebrating her 2020 commencement with a rescheduled Georgetown University ceremony. Now Ms. Ferrell is selling her longtime home in New Jersey and moving. Where is up in the air. (Top contenders include Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and California.)

“The world is open to me,” she says. “I feel like I’ve done my job and now I’ve earned the right to sit back and live for myself.”

Our modern lives have been filled with more and more transitions over the years, says Bruce Feiler, the author of a book on the topic. We have more autonomy and options than the generations that came before us, he says. People are seizing on this moment to swap jobs, partners, regions and religions.

“Nobody can cope with this much change,” he notes. Some of us launch into multi-item to-do lists, determined to ace the transformation in a weekend. Others “lie under the covers in a fetal position with their cat and they say, ‘I’m never going to get through it.’ ”

Both paths are wrong, he says. Instead, take time to mark the transition. Commemorate it with a ceremony, a trip, a special meal. Talk about your feelings, instead of blocking them out.

Then try something new. Things were upside down for so long anyway. Now is the moment to embrace your creativity, he says, launching a personal project like woodworking or poetry-writing. Shed things you don’t like about yourself, from extra pounds to your people-pleasing tendencies. Finding a community to go through it with you can help.

Of course, it’s almost never easy. Ms. Ferrell, the new empty-nester, says she wakes in the middle of the night sometimes, heart heavy with the surreal realization that her girls will soon be strewn from Los Angeles to London. Will Pryor, who moved to Raleigh, N.C., last month for his first job as an attending physician, worries about how welcoming his new community will be to his same-sex relationship.

“We go where we have to, where we’re needed,” says the 35-year-old, who finds it thrilling and strange to be done with a decade of medical training.

A few hours away in Charlotte, N.C., Christine Schmid is marking the days until her Sept. 17 wedding with an iPhone countdown and daily love notes from her soon-to-be husband. Forty-five years old, she never thought she’d marry, opting instead to focus on her career in human resources.

She can’t wait to wear the off-white gown that makes her feel like Cinderella and be reunited with extended family coming in for the occasion. But grief is ever-present too. The dear friend who helped set her up with her fiancé passed away from cancer last year, as did Ms. Schmid’s beloved dog. The friend had been set to perform the wedding ceremony; the pup was going to walk down the aisle.

Now both are gone, and Ms. Schmid is reckoning with losing a part of herself, too. She’s changing her name, becoming a stepmother, losing the ability to do what she likes without asking or informing anyone else.

“I wanted to make sure I wasn’t giving up ‘me’ to become ‘us,’ ” she says. Taking some time for herself each workday—an hourlong break, no interruptions allowed—has helped, along with supporting causes she cares about, like animal rights.

Even the happiest of changes can come with some stress, says psychologist Joshua Coleman, as we grapple with the future and all its unknowns. Plus, many of us were promised prior fresh starts that didn’t materialize. We had to reschedule the bat mitzvah again because of a new Covid-19 variant; we had job offers rescinded due to a swinging economy. Holding our breath through the uncertainty, exhausted after so much back and forth, can make transitions even harder, says Dr. Coleman, who is a senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families.

Examine your anxieties up close, he recommends. Are they rational? Parse what you’re afraid of and figure out which problems are solvable. Then solve them. Talk back to the worries that are irrational, reminding yourself of past transitions that worked out well.

Emily Hulthen’s transition to parenthood earlier in the pandemic was so trying she considered not having any more children. Working until 1 a.m. while watching her son during the day, she felt exhausted and irrationally angry, she says.

“I thought I would be a natural at this,” the 32-year-old in Columbus, Ohio, remembers thinking.

Eventually, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and found relief with therapy.

She still feels guilt and sadness over her son’s babyhood. But pregnant with a daughter, she told me she was grateful for the chance to try again. Watching her son get vaccinated recently, thinking about the pumpkin picking and tailgating to come this fall as a family of four, she cried.

“It felt like it was a light at the end of the tunnel,” she says.

Her daughter, Nora Lynne Birnbrich, was born on Friday.

The marketplace has spoken and, at least for now, it’s showing preference for hybrids and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) over battery electrics. That makes Toyota’s foot dragging on EVs (and full speed ahead on hybrids) look fairly wise, though the timeline along a bumpy road still gets us to full electrification by 2035.

Italian supercar producer Lamborghini, in business since 1963, is also proceeding, incrementally, toward battery power. In an interview, Federico Foschini , Lamborghini’s chief global marketing and sales officer, talked about the new Urus SE plug-in hybrid the company showed at its lounge in New York on Monday.

The Urus SE interior gets a larger centre screen and other updates.
Lamborghini

The Urus SE SUV will sell for US$258,000 in the U.S. (the company’s biggest market) when it goes on sale internationally in the first quarter of 2025, Foschini says.

“We’re using the contribution from the electric motor and battery to not only lower emissions but also to boost performance,” he says. “Next year, all three of our models [the others are the Revuelto, a PHEV from launch, and the continuation of the Huracán] will be available as PHEVs.”

The Euro-spec Urus SE will have a stated 37 miles of electric-only range, thanks to a 192-horsepower electric motor and a 25.9-kilowatt-hour battery, but that distance will probably be less in stricter U.S. federal testing. In electric mode, the SE can reach 81 miles per hour. With the 4-litre 620-horsepower twin-turbo V8 engine engaged, the picture is quite different. With 789 horsepower and 701 pound-feet of torque on tap, the SE—as big as it is—can reach 62 mph in 3.4 seconds and attain 193 mph. It’s marginally faster than the Urus S, but also slightly under the cutting-edge Urus Performante model. Lamborghini says the SE reduces emissions by 80% compared to a standard Urus.

Lamborghini’s Urus plans are a little complicated. The company’s order books are full through 2025, but after that it plans to ditch the S and Performante models and produce only the SE. That’s only for a year, however, because the all-electric Urus should arrive by 2029.

Lamborghini’s Federico Foschini with the Urus SE in New York.
Lamborghini

Thanks to the electric motor, the Urus SE offers all-wheel drive. The motor is situated inside the eight-speed automatic transmission, and it acts as a booster for the V8 but it can also drive the wheels on its own. The electric torque-vectoring system distributes power to the wheels that need it for improved cornering. The Urus SE has six driving modes, with variations that give a total of 11 performance options. There are carbon ceramic brakes front and rear.

To distinguish it, the Urus SE gets a new “floating” hood design and a new grille, headlights with matrix LED technology and a new lighting signature, and a redesigned bumper. There are more than 100 bodywork styling options, and 47 interior color combinations, with four embroidery types. The rear liftgate has also been restyled, with lights that connect the tail light clusters. The rear diffuser was redesigned to give 35% more downforce (compared to the Urus S) and keep the car on the road.

The Urus represents about 60% of U.S. Lamborghini sales, Foschini says, and in the early years 80% of buyers were new to the brand. Now it’s down to 70%because, as Foschini says, some happy Urus owners have upgraded to the Performante model. Lamborghini sold 3,000 cars last year in the U.S., where it has 44 dealers. Global sales were 10,112, the first time the marque went into five figures.

The average Urus buyer is 45 years old, though it’s 10 years younger in China and 10 years older in Japan. Only 10% are women, though that percentage is increasing.

“The customer base is widening, thanks to the broad appeal of the Urus—it’s a very usable car,” Foschini says. “The new buyers are successful in business, appreciate the technology, the performance, the unconventional design, and the fun-to-drive nature of the Urus.”

Maserati has two SUVs in its lineup, the Levante and the smaller Grecale. But Foschini says Lamborghini has no such plans. “A smaller SUV is not consistent with the positioning of our brand,” he says. “It’s not what we need in our portfolio now.”

It’s unclear exactly when Lamborghini will become an all-battery-electric brand. Foschini says that the Italian automaker is working with Volkswagen Group partner Porsche on e-fuel, synthetic and renewably made gasoline that could presumably extend the brand’s internal-combustion identity. But now, e-fuel is very expensive to make as it relies on wind power and captured carbon dioxide.

During Monterey Car Week in 2023, Lamborghini showed the Lanzador , a 2+2 electric concept car with high ground clearance that is headed for production. “This is the right electric vehicle for us,” Foschini says. “And the production version will look better than the concept.” The Lanzador, Lamborghini’s fourth model, should arrive in 2028.

The Excitement And Anxiety Of A New Start

Transitions can be tough—here’s how to embrace them in this moment of change.