Inventing the Rest of Our Lives Quotes

“Letting Go.”
― Suzanne Braun Levine, Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood

“Stop Listening to Others.”
― Suzanne Braun Levine, Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood

“A lot of us don’t have big passions, like ‘I knew from the time I was three I was going to be a concert pianist,’ so we have to issue an invitation to even a little flicker of interest.”
― Suzanne Braun Levine, Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood

“Tune In to What Turns You On. “This is often very poignant,” says Karen, “because a lot of women say, ‘I don’t know.’ It is very frightening for them. They don’t know if they care about anything.”
― Suzanne Braun Levine, Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood

“Listen to Yourself. It isn’t easy to sit still for yourself. Especially, Ruth points out, “when we’re uncomfortable. And this is uncomfortable stuff, because there’s something nagging, and you don’t know what it is, and you don’t know what to do about it, with a capital do.”
― Suzanne Braun Levine, Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood

“The Fertile Void is a necessary, albeit bewildering, hiatus. Paradoxically, as Rubenfeld observed in her book The Listening Hand, it is “a place of change in which one sometimes feels ‘stuck.’” For a proactive woman, the response to being “stuck” is to expend more energy, make more lists, go to more seminars, try to muster more will power, make more decisions. But the result, she often finds, is just spinning her wheels. The solution, ironically, is not more movement, but less. The cure for “stuck” is “still.” A gathering in of the energy unleashed by Saying No and Letting Go. That is what the Fertile Void can offer, an opportunity to exchange the wish to control life for a willingness to engage living.”
― Suzanne Braun Levine, Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood

“We are restless and curious and ready to get to work. The doubts and the “zest” create crosscurrents that can cancel each other out and leave us stymied by a sense of aimlessness. That is the Fertile Void. Traveling through it is an existential mission without a goal. Having goals at the start will only throw you off course. Meaningful goals will emerge in their own good time. But the unremitting unknowingness is hard to take.”
― Suzanne Braun Levine, Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood