one form, stage, or style to another

Transition:
Webster says it's "passage from one state, stage, subject, or place to another, CHANGE;
a movement, development, or evolution from one form, stage, or style to another,"
and even he feels ambiguous at best to this thing I'm trying to navigate. I remember being warned about the "real world," but any words of wisdom on how to navigate it are lost somewhere in this passage from one state to another, a state that feels tumultuous in a frozen, sluggish sort of way, like a hurricane painted in still life.

I try to get used to this:
daily drive to work, cup of coffee (two, three...) to warm my hands, chilled by the the vent that never fails to blow above my window, whether in the snows of early April or the streaming sunlight of the weeks before. I've got it down--how to write in:

• succinct,
  
• yet detailed,
  
• bullet points;

I've got objectives mapping out the next 8 months; I'm learning to plan out my day, prioritize...the scattered papers across my disorganized desk an objets d'art to something delightfully irregular.

But I haven't mastered the CHANGE, the move from a day filled with words and philosophers to a life of "personal development plans" and people arguing about whether to source cream cheese or peanut butter. Somehow I can't, don't want to, make myself fit there.

The work world never seemed glamourous; I'm not that naive, but I imagined those "free nights" with eagerness born of too many nights huddled over my computer screen, scraping words from a mind more like a wrung-out dishrag than a sponge. But they came then, the words that seem to elude me now, during free nights not filled with last-minute papers, dark-mooned eyes trying to eek out what the heck was so great about Aristotle.

I'm still trying to find movement, evolution from one form to another.