Starting a Conversation
Like many of you, I approach a technological adventure such as blogging with trepidation. But I also relish the opportunity to communicate with people I haven't met about our common life experience. If I have learned anything in over thirty years of editing, writing about, and living "women's issues," it is that we do best when we share our stories. In fact, studies are finding that when a woman has the support of a "circle of trust" - women she can count on - the stress-reducing and pleasure-enhancing hormone oxytocin is released.
As I talk to women I meet around the country, I am learning that for many of them, reading groups and book clubs are serving that function. The choice of a title and the discussion it generates invoke the spirit of "conscious-raising" groups of old. I am hoping that my book will generate some of that kind of free-range truth telling and information-sharing. And if so, I'd like to hear about it.
Most of all, I'd like my website to become a meeting place for those who are pioneering this new life experience of Second Adulthood and also for those who aren't there yet, but are - to say the least - curious about what lies ahead. What do they want to know? What have we learned, read, researched, worried about, laughed about that we can share with them - and each other?
I look forward to our conversation.
As I talk to women I meet around the country, I am learning that for many of them, reading groups and book clubs are serving that function. The choice of a title and the discussion it generates invoke the spirit of "conscious-raising" groups of old. I am hoping that my book will generate some of that kind of free-range truth telling and information-sharing. And if so, I'd like to hear about it.
Most of all, I'd like my website to become a meeting place for those who are pioneering this new life experience of Second Adulthood and also for those who aren't there yet, but are - to say the least - curious about what lies ahead. What do they want to know? What have we learned, read, researched, worried about, laughed about that we can share with them - and each other?
I look forward to our conversation.
posted by Suzanne Braun Levine at 11:40 AM
2 Comments:
I'm reading your book right now and am amazed on nearly every page at how deeply it resonates with my recent experiences. I'm 53 years old, separated/divorced for three years after a 29-year marriage. I LOVE your term "the Fertile Void," because I feel like I've been floating there for the last several years. It's immensely reassuring to know that I'm not the only one who feels like I'm on the verge of a huge surge of creativity...without having the least idea of what I intend to create! I'm struggling mightily with the anxiety produced by the ambiguity of my life right now. Thank you for helping me put it into a context that makes sense.
I just read the excerpts from your book, and loved it so much that I ordered a copy for myself, my mom and my best friend!
The three of us are all somewhere in different stages of our adulthood. For the three of us, this is our last year of a specific decade - my mom is about going to 69, my friend is about to be 59 and I'm about to be 49. And we're all facing similar but different challenges - mom is married and retired, while her husband (who's 10 years younger than she is) is still working. Syd is single, but ready to start looking for love, and I'm recently married for the second time (after being a widow).
We've all talked about the challenges and our need to "become" more than we are right now. I'm looking forward to reading your book with them, and looking for answers to our questions.
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