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.