Suzanne Braun Levine,
TEDxWomen.org
Last December in New York City, Suzanne Braun Levine captivated the TEDxWomen community with her frank, humorous and insightful words on womanhood and aging. Ms. Levine has one of those stops-me-in-my-tracks resumes: the first editor of Ms. magazine; an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review; a producer of the Peabody Award-winning documentary She’s Nobody’s Baby: American Women in the Twentieth Century; a web maven, with a thoughtful and resource-filled website of her own, who blogs on many popular sites; and the author of numerous books, including the recently released How We Love Now: Sex and Intimacy in Second Adulthood.
Wanting to hear more from Ms. Levine, we asked her to answer a few questions to share with the TEDxWomen community. We’re thrilled she said yes!
In your TEDxWomen talk, you spoke of The Fertile Void, the time in a woman’s life between her first and second adulthood. Calling it “a life transition as profound and far-reaching as adolescence,” you shared how The Fertile Void is a time to ask ourselves who we are, what matters to us and how we can be engaged in the world. How did you come to the term The Fertile Void? What are the signs one has entered it? And when do you know you’ve left it?
I have been moved and gratified by the way the term “The Fertile Void” has entered the conversation about aging. Actually the term is a Taoist concept that describes a step in the process of change, when everything seems lost and nothing yet found. That is where we find ourselves as we make the transition from adulthood – a well-documented and well-scripted stage of life – to Second Adulthood – a totally new life experience being defined by living longer and healthier lives and by arriving there as more confident and experienced women (men get there too, but not along quite the same route).
The tricky thing about making this transition is that it takes longer than we would like and, worse, it is all about unknowingness. We multi-tasking magicians, who are used to making a list and checking it twice, find it maddening to be falling down an Alice’s Rabbit’s hole of self-doubt and bewilderment. We find ourselves lost in a void, but the essential insight is that this void is fertile. At an age when so much attention is being paid to women’s lost biological fertility, this spiritual fertility can give birth to a fresh and strong and fulfilling chapter in our lives.
Like adolescence, that other very tumultuous transition that it resembles, Second Adulthood is about reinvention. Margaret Mead once said that adolescence is no less than “the birth of the soul.” The Fertile Void is, I believe, where the soul is reborn.