The winter always seems like the perfect time for reflection, reading books I haven’t had time for during the ‘longer’ days. Also spending more time online, searching, exploring, reading what others are doing, opening to new concepts I can enrich my life with. So here are some of the things I am exploring - this one from some info on Improvisation and how this art teaches us new ways to approach life…..from the book, Improv Wisdom: Don.t Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madson, www.improvwisdom.com

This is going to sound crazy. Say yes to everything. Accept all offers. Go along with the plan. Support someone else’s dream. Say “yes”; “right”; “sure”; “I will”; “okay”; “of course”; “YES!” Cultivate all the ways you can imagine to express affirmation. When the answer to all questions is yes, you enter a new world, a world of action, possibility, and adventure. Molly Bloom’s famous line from Ulysses draws us into her ecstasy. Humans long to connect. Yes glues us together. Yes starts the juices rolling. Yes gets us into heaven and also into trouble. Trouble is not so bad when we are in it together, actually.

The world of yes may be the single most powerful secret of improvising. It allows players who have no history with one another to create a scene effortlessly, telepathically. Safety lies in knowing your partner will go along with whatever idea you present. Life is too short to argue over which movie to see. Seize the first idea and go with it. Don’t confuse this with being a “yes-man,” implying mindless pandering. Saying yes is an act of courage and optimism; it allows you to share control. It is a way to make your partner happy. Yes expands your world…

With the rule of yes, we call upon our capacity to envision, to create new and positive images. This yes invites us to find out what is right about the situation, what is good about the offer, what is worthy in the proposal. Exercising the yes muscle builds optimism. However, we sensibly understand that the practice of affirmation is not a guarantee of outcomes. Saying yes to life will not banish problems or promise eternal success. A positive perspective is a constructive one, however, and it is easier on those around us.

try this:

For one day say yes to everything that’s offered. Set your own preferences aside. Notice the results. See how often it may not be convenient or easy to do this.

I’ll let you know more on my experience with this….I’m working on “yes, and…” where I get to set my boundaries of willingness! Your thoughts and experiences are welcome.

No I’m not going to say anything specific right now about ’sex’ - and no I have not even read this new book yet - just released this week! But I have been reading the excerpts and interviews, Gail’s blog, and visited the Seasoned Woman Network to read comments. I think the media is playing big with the ’sex’ aspect of the book when there is a lot of very important dimensions to what Sheehy is offering up in this newest book which explores the Second Adulthood (ages mid 40s to 70s) and marks the 30th anniversary since her book Passages and more recent The Silent Passage about menopause.

What makes a seasoned woman?

Time.

A seasoned woman is spicy. She has been marinated in life experience. Like a complex wine, she can be alternately sweet, tart, sparkling, mellow. She is both maternal and playful. Assured, alluring, and resourceful. She is less likely to have an agenda than a young woman—no biological clock tick-tocking beside her lover’s bed, no campaign to lead him to the altar, no rescue fantasies. The seasoned woman knows who she is. She could be any one of us, as long as she is committed to living fully and passionately in the second half of her life, despite failures and false starts.

Just how old is a seasoned woman? I define it very much the way Auntie Mame’s friend Vera did when asked, “How old are you, anyway?”
“Somewhere between forty and death.”

It’s not over at 45 or 50, “it” being sex, intimacy, discovery of a new identity and a new passion in life. On the contrary, it begins all over again. Today, 50 is the start of a whole new cycle. You may have already lived an entire adulthood, but now you are at the beginning of another one—a portion of the life span that I identified in 1995 as our Second Adulthood.

Women’s lives are long and have many seasons. As contemporary women, if we’re healthy, we will likely be around longer than our mothers were. As I first reported in New Passages, epidemiologists say that a woman who reaches the age of 50 free of cancer and heart disease can expect to see her ninety-second birthday….

Time is perceived differently after 50. People begin counting backward, thinking in terms of years left to live. But that may be forty years or more, and we can elect to make something magnificent of it. This is a huge cultural shift, making possible what I call the Pursuit of the Passionate Life.

If you would like to know how others are responding to this new book, check out the Seasoned Woman Network. And feel free to post your comments here also.