Last week I had the pleasure of attending a Smart Talk Connected Conversation with Jane Pauley. I was thrilled to go, because I have followed her career and life with admiration from her first appearance on The Today Show in 1976. Maybe it's her Midwestern roots, but she has an everywoman quality that makes me feel as if she's a friend rather than a celebrity. Her journey is emblematic of the path that so many women take through life, and exploring and embracing the changes of this middle part of life was the topic of her talk.

We all know that Baby Boomers have reinvented every stage of life as we move through it, and now we are poised to reinvent old age. With our increased life spans and more importantly increased "health spans" people our age can reasonably expect to live another 30-40 years of good health and productivity, with "old age" in the traditional sense compressed into just a few years at the end of our lives. This extended "mid-life" period presents a challenge and an opportunity, particularly for many women whose lives are built on the three pillars of identity: Daughter - Wife - Mother. For many of us two or even all three of these pillars are knocked out from under us in the fifth decade of life as we send our children off to college and lose our parents or even our spouse. We may find ourselves asking "Who am I now?"

In 2003 this question led Jane to leave NBC after 27 years, in search of work she would love. She embarked on an ambitious adventure, a daytime talk show, competing with the likes of Oprah and Dr. Phil. In spite of the cancellation of this show after just one season, Jane recalls this time with pride. She doesn't consider it a failure, because the lessons she learned in this effort are now the building blocks of her future endeavors, lessons about who she is now and where her true gifts lie. And importantly, as she puts it, "I wanted my children to think of me as someone who tries."  She refers to the period of unemployment since as a fallow period - a time for the field of her mind to lie unplanted and allow the "weeds" or mental clutter to clear away and give her a better view of her future. During this time she has almost compulsively collected stories of the life paths of friends and acquaintances, and destroyed countless newspapers by clipping out articles that relate to this theme. She has realized that inspiration is everywhere but you have to be looking for it, be open to the possibilities. She has come to belive that we often don't recognize the gifts we give to the world when they come naturally to us, and that many of us are not able to see their gifts the way others see them. Her mission in the coming years is to find ways to help people, and particularly women, see themselves in powerful new ways and use this extended mid-life period to share their gifts with the world. She doesn't yet know exactly how that will happen, but the important thing is she is open to possibilities, and she is a person who tries.

So, how does this relate to memory books and the busines of Beyond the Trees, you may be asking? Well, maybe it doesn't. Other than the fact that this little brain child is the answer to the question Jennifer and I asked ourselves at a similar point in our lives - Who are we now and how can we find work that we love? We made a conscious decision to become "people who try" and took a leap of faith. This is the result of that leap.

For any of you who might also be at a turning point in your life, I'll leave you with one last anecdote from Jane's talk. Her final Dateline interview in 2003 was with Michael J. Fox, who maintains an active life of acting, non-profit work and political advocacy in spite of suffering from Parkinson's disease. When Jane commented that if she were in his situation she thought she'd be taking it easy, conserving her energy, Michael replied "But what would you be conserving your energy for?" Jane has taken this as a bit of a mantra and asks herself that question whenever her energy or motivation flag. She concluded her talk that night by asking all of us, and as we look ahead to the possibility of thirty or forty more years of healthy productivity we'll ask you - "What are you conserving your energy for?" 

~Kristi