Welcome to our Blog!

This blog began as a conversation between two women in their fifties, each in a new and unfamiliar phase of their lives. Haunani and Peggy were both business women who closed businesses in 2008. You will hear more details about that simply stated fact in several postings on this blog. Check out the business, health and technology sections to hear more.

As we talked together and looked around for articles, books and other sources of inspiration and information, we found something missing. We searched websites, blogs, support groups and books and we couldn’t find the conversation we were having. Now, that may be because our conversations are always a bit funky, but we suspect there are other 50 something women out there who are having the same conversations – or would like to.

Suzanne Braun Levine wrote a book in 2005 called “Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in second adulthood.” We both read it, and it is probably the framework that started us down this journey of conversation. Levine describes the journey of “The Question (what am I going to do with the rest of my life?) in its serial form – What matters? What works? And what’s next?” (1) We talk about her book more in later postings, but this gives you a sense of how this whole thing got started.

Here we were, two women whose life had been defined (at least a significant part of it) by our professions and our work. We always worked and saw ourselves as professionals making our way through our lifetime’s maze of employers and business ventures. There is an interesting yin and yang between us, as Huanani is the engineer and Peggy the social worker, so we approach the maze with different mental processes. But we have had interestingly similar paths. You can read about us in our bios.

Nothing we found out in the blogs, articles, media, discussions, seemed to be talking about what we were talking about. Sounds egocentric, I’m sure, but the traditional response to our present situation – go find a job, or a business, or get busy, or make money – just didn’t seem to fit this time. Our old ways of responding weren’t working, either because of our individual needs or the economy itself, and we hadn’t yet developed any new ways.

So, we started listening to ourselves and each other. And what we are learning in that process is what we want to share – with any of you who are interested in listening and speaking back. Here are some things we take away from our still evolving process:

1. Take time. There is a sense of urgency to being what we call “work still.”  If you have always worked and now you aren’t, for women, particularly, this creates a sense of panicky guilt.  No productive activity and no money coming in.  But take the time to listen to yourself, even when everyone else thinks you are wasting time.  What you do with that time will be as varied as the women who take it.
2. Speak. We don’t care if you speak here in this blog, in your own families, with support groups, in the library, in chat rooms, wherever.  Just speak.  We believe that turning thinking into speaking is transforming.
3. Passion equals power. If you find what you are passionate about, you will find a way to take back the power this inactivity has had over you.  Your passion will show you the path, even if it doesn’t seem very obvious when you start.
4. Life is a spiral curriculum. You will discover, explore and learn about things that will seem very familiar to you.  It’s because you have heard them before, but then they weren’t important and you didn’t need them.  Now you do and you are learning them in a new way.

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started.
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot

Yes, there are millions of blogs out there and we suspect you may be asking yourself – Why another blog?   According to the 2007 State of the Blogosphere report (the most recent I could find), “Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we’re seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That’s about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day.”  (We think we have a theory on why so many blogs, but you will need to go to our technology category to read more about that.}

So why in the world are we creating another one?  We think we have found something both profound and simple at the same time.  We provide each other strong and true sounding boards – opportunities to talk problems without the need for solution.  We think out loud to offer each and other the chance to move from thinking to speaking – and eventually to action.  It’s a process that is virtually impossible to accomplish on your own. So we have combined the “cyberinfrasture,” in this case, a blog, with the very personal, individual, excruciatingly human need for discourse.  So it really doesn’t matter if everyone sees it, or if even a bunch of people see it.  It only matters that enough of you choose to speak – and the conversation is worthwhile enough for us to keep talking.

(1) Levine, Suzanne Braun.  Reinventing the Rest of Our Lives:  Women in Second Adulthood.  New York:  Penquin Press  2005. p.19.