If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.
Gail Sheehy
Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.
Stress overload makes us stupid. Solid research proves it. When we get overstressed, it creates a nasty chemical soup in our brains that makes it hard to pull out of the anxious depressive spiral.
To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist.
If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing.
When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.
The delights of self-discovery are always available.
Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.
It was my very good fortune to find a mentor, Clay Felker, who started my career at the 'New York Magazine' as a freelance writer when I had to quit my job at the 'Herald Tribune' to stay home with my young daughter.
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!
My husband, Clay Felker, died 17 years after his first cancer due to secondary conditions that developed from treatment.
Family caregiving has become a predictable crisis. Americans are living longer and longer but dying slower and slower.
Sex and older women used to be considered an oxymoron, rarely mentioned in the same breath.
We see it in the body, that if you just give the body enough rest and comfort, it has remarkable self-healing capacities. Well, so does the spirit.
Be willing to shed parts of your previous life. For example, in our 20s, we wear a mask; we pretend we know more than we do. We must be willing, as we get older, to shed cocktail party phoniness and admit, 'I am who I am.'
Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough.
The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan, and it collapsed for no rational reason.
Most women have learned a great deal about how to set goals for our First Adulthood and how to roll with the punches when we hit a rough passage. But we're less prepared for our Second Adulthood as we approach life after retirement, where there are no fixed entrances or exits, and lots of sand into which it is easy to bury our heads.
It was so naive to think that there was nothing interesting that happened after 55. Come on, there's a whole second adulthood!
I actually interviewed other people about myself, and that alerted me to the fact that I had to really investigate my memories.
The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.
It is a paradox that as we reach out prime, we also see there is a place where it finishes.
I know I'm never going to probably see the Taj Mahal or, you know, climb Mt. Everest, but I can still maybe influence peoples' way of thinking by a story that I do, by something I learn about the world.
I was devastated when I got the review for my first book. The book came out a couple years before the women's movement broke through, and people were putting it down, asking, 'Why does the woman in this book need to get a divorce? Why can't she just shut up and be happy?'
People in grief need someone to walk with them without judging them.
It seems like, to me, somewhere between 30 and 35 is a really, really good time to turn your eggs into babies.
If you're the person living closest to the parent who's going to need help, and you take on the whole role of primary caregiver, you can be pretty sure your sibling who lives farthest away is going to call you and say, 'You don't know what you're doing.' Because they're not on the spot, and they probably feel guilty.
This is something caregivers have to understand: You have to ask for help. You have to realize that you deserve to ask for help. Because you need to keep on working on your own life.
I do think women can have it all - but not all women. If you take daring steps and are smart about it, you can probably have it all. But you might have to wait a while.
I found the happiest woman in America is between 50 and 55, is happily married, has made significant progress in her career, and lives in a community where she can easily exercise outside. But the most important single thing was she had her last child before she was 35.
The first thing one notices about Jill Abramson is her short stature. The second is her intensity.
Adapting to our Second Adulthood is not all about the money. It requires thinking about how to find a new locus of identity or how to adjust to a spouse who stops working and who may loll, enjoying coffee and reading the paper online while you're still commuting.
Being a pathfinder is to be willing to risk failure and still go on.
In the first phase of shock over, say, your mortgage being called in or your job washed out, it's essential to engage with others and share the fear, release the feelings, do fun things to take your mind off it.
One of the ways we women often handicap ourselves is thinking that once we've made a decision or a commitment, we can't change.
You don't have to feel confident to act confident. In fact, it's the most important acting job you can learn.
I've had the experience of having a book praised but then it doesn't sell. Or not praised but then it sells.
In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.
In rough times, pathfinders rely on work, friends, humor and prayer. They develop a support network.
I actually like getting out of my comfort zone. It shakes me up.
I'd visually have that idea. I'm diving off the end of the diving board. I'm not going to be worried about if I'm going to dive into a jellyfish or the water's going to be too cold or the boys are going to beat me. I'm just doing it. And if I do it, it's a good chance I'll make it.
No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.
The dream for many millennial women is to make a difference as social or political entrepreneurs. They are using the social media and marketing tools they have mastered to empower less fortunate women and direct them onto career tracks that women have traditionally avoided, like science and technology.
Like everyone else in the first weeks after the tragedy of 9/11, I was looking frantically for some way to help.
The feminist spirit still lives! It shows most boldly among younger women from the millennial generation.
I found that female pathfinders generally integrate characteristics commonly associated with being women - like the capacity to be intimate - with 'male' ones like ambition and courage.
In the case of my husband, we found that facing a life-threatening illness prodded us to make a dramatic change in our lives.
I dare to do things - that's how I survive.
I do think taking the 20s to take the most chances you can is important, because you're not going to hurt anyone else during that time. And if you do have a partner, you need a couple years to rehearse that relationship.
