by Jane Fonda
In 1996, Erik and Joan Erikson wrote, in The Life Cycle Completed, “Lacking a culturally viable ideal of old age, our civilization does not really harbor a concept of the whole of life.”4 The old ways of thinking about age, the fears of losing our youth and facing our own mortality, have kept us from seeing Act III as a vital, integrated part of our overall story, the potential-filled culmination of the first two acts. This old thinking is even more tragic now, in light of the extension of the life span. It can rob us of wholeness, and it can rob society of what we each, in our ripeness, have to offer.
With my dog Tulea in 2004.
MAX COLIN/ELIOT PRESS
Those of us now entering our Third Acts are, on the whole, physically stronger and healthier than ever before. There is every likelihood that, if we work at it individually and collectively, we can develop a new “culturally viable ideal of old age” and see our lives as a series of stages that build one upon the other. Our doing so will not be just for us; it will represent a major cultural shift for the world around us and will help younger generations reconceive of their own life spans.
I have been inspired and encouraged by what I have learned while writing this book. I hope reading it will do the same for you.
In Part One, I set the stage by discussing the three acts of life, the challenges and gifts that each of them presents, and ways for you to begin to step back—now, at whatever act you are in—and become a witness to your own life, in all its stages, and thus see better how to live the rest of it with greater intention, freedom, and clarity. I also write about how doing a life review transformed how I am living my Third Act.
In Part Two, I write about the body, the brain, and our attitudes. There’s some pretty good news there, as well as a new word: Positivity! I also, in Chapter 10, go into detail about how to write a life review.
Part Three goes into every dimension of love, friendship, and sex, including how to meet new people. You’ll find a few good laughs in there, along with a lot of handy tips.
Part Four isn’t what you’d expect in a book like this. But some of the most respected experts on aging believe—as do I—that to mount that staircase of late-life development as a fully realized person, we need to become advocates for the future. This can mean mentoring young children or protecting abused women; it can mean caring for the planet, feeling some responsibility for the big picture beyond ourselves. The psychiatrist Erik Erikson referred to this as “Generativity,” and here’s more good news: The thirty-year-long Harvard Study of Adult Development shows that among the women in the sample, “mastering Generativity … was the best predictor of whether they reported attaining regular orgasm”!5
Part Four is also about the importance of facing our mortality and planning for late life—emotionally, financially, legally, and in terms of what we can do, individually and together, to make our society more supportive of seniors and help create a happier environment for them.
Part Five shows us how learning to go inward—spiritually and metaphysically—allows us to look outward with new eyes.
And so let’s begin.
CHAPTER 1
Act III: Becoming Whole
The greatest potential for growth and self-realization exists in the second half of life.
—CARL JUNG
Tulea and me during our “Broadway Series” skit in 2009.
HOW OLD DO YOU FEEL?” SOMEONE ASKED ME RECENTLY. I THOUGHT for a moment before answering. I wanted to really consider the question and not give a glib “I feel forty” sort of answer. “I feel seventy,” I said, remembering a retort of Pablo Picasso’s: “It takes a long time to become young.”
Ageism
A while back, I spoke to a group of adolescent girls, and when I mentioned my age, some of them winced. They whispered to me that I should not let on how old I was, because I didn’t look seventy. They meant this to be a compliment, but I found it sad and a little scary. Like a lot of us when we were their age, and like our culture in general, these young women viewed age as something to hide, as if youth were the pinnacle of life. Well, maybe it is the pinnacle in terms of body tautness or sperm and egg count or thickness of cartilage and bilateral activation of the parahippocampal gyrus! But I’m not the only one who wouldn’t want to go back to adolescence—not for anything! It’s too hard! There’s too much anxiety about trying to fit in! I also wouldn’t care to repeat my twenties and thirties, for that matter. For me, those years were too fraught with trying to make my mark. And heaven forbid, let’s not repeat the “in between” time of the late forties and early fifties.
Richard and me on the red carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, 2011.
CRAIG BARRITT/GETTY IMAGES
For me, the “good old days” were really the “so-so old days.” I spent far too much time worrying that I wasn’t good enough, smart enough, thin enough, talented enough. I can honestly say that in terms of feelings of well-being, right now is the best time of my life. All those enoughnesses I worried about just don’t matter as much anymore. I have come to believe that when you’re actually inside oldness, as opposed to anticipating it from the outside, the fear subsides. You discover that you are still yourself, probably even more so.
For me, right now, this time in my life feels like I am beginning to become who I was meant to be all along. Act III isn’t at all what I expected. I never envisioned myself as a happy, learning-to-be-wise older woman.
It didn’t just happen. I have worked at it. I have been fortunate in myriad ways, and I have (sometimes despite myself) done what I needed to do to make the most of what I was given.
In society’s terms I may be seen as “over the hill,” but I’ve discovered a new, different, challenging landscape on the other side—a landscape filled with new depths of love, new ways of interacting with friends and strangers, new ways of expressing myself and facing setbacks, and, by the way, more hills … literally.
Hiking Machu Picchu in 2000.
Carl Jung pondered whether “the afternoon of human life [was] merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning” or if it had a significance of its own.1
I believe that Rudolf Arnheim’s diagrams of the arch and the staircase (which I wrote about in the Preface) answer Jung’s question perfectly. Yes, Act III has its own significance! This is when we are meant to go deeper, to become whole. It is the time to move from ego to soul, as the spiritual teacher Ram Dass says.
Professor Arnheim further illustrated his point by showing his students slides of the early and late life works of some of the world’s greatest artists. He felt that the paintings of the Impressionists, for example, were the “products of detached contemplation” that age can bring. The character and practical value of the material things they painted were no longer considered relevant; the specificity became blurred, so that, he says, what the Impressionists give us is “a world view that transcends outer appearance to search out the underlying essentials.”2
Slowing Down, Going Deeper
Over breakfast at a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I interviewed Dr. Marion Perlmutter, who is with the Center for Human Growth and Development and the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Expanding on Professor Arnheim’s point, she told me, “It may be that it is only by suppression of certain things that we can actually get to higher levels. Was it that Monet had cataracts and couldn’t see well or was it that because of the suppression of that detail of vision he was able to get to the deeper level of the Impressionist essence? Cézanne had macular degeneration when he did his later pastels. Beethoven was deaf when he composed his Ninth Symphony. In late life we talk about slowing down as this horrible thing, but we also know that cognition is time-bound; the longer you take, the deeper you get to conceptualization. I think physiology helps us get there. It may be that only by slowing down can we really get more of a global perspective.”3
The poem “Monet Refuses the Operation,” by Lisel Mueller, explains so artfully how age and infirmities can bring deeper
insights. Here is an excerpt:
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart are the same state of being.…
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three dimensional space.
33 VARIATIONS
Right after my seventy-first birthday, I was working on this book when I was asked to star on Broadway in 33 Variations, a new play by Moisés Kaufman. My character was a contemporary music scholar trying to understand why Beethoven spent three of his later years, when he was deaf and very ill, writing thirty-three variations on what was generally considered to be a mediocre waltz composed by Anton Diabelli, a well-known music publisher of the time. Imagine my surprise and pleasure when I discovered that my character’s final monologue touches upon this very theme: how the exigencies of late life that cause us to slow down also permit a different, deeper kind of seeing.
A scene in 33 Variations, with my character leaning against Beethoven.
CRAIG SCHWARTZ
The character I play explains how at first she had assumed that Beethoven had written the thirty-three variations in order to show mid-eighteenth-century Vienna what a grand masterpiece he could make out of a mediocre waltz. What she learned, however, was very different: She realized that Beethoven knew that the waltz was a simple, popular waltz that people danced to in beer halls. In delving to its depths, Beethoven pierced and dissected it in his thirty-three variations, turning a fifty-second waltz into a brilliant fifty-minute composition. He was sick and deaf, but he was showing us how, when we allow ourselves (or are forced) to slow down and see, what may appear banal on the surface can flower into magnificence.
Ripening Consciousness
We’re not all Monet, Cézanne, or Beethoven, but we all have the potential to achieve the flowering of consciousness—to learn to really see—and this can occur later in life, even in the presence of terrible physical infirmities.
The day of my final performance in 33 Variations, I read an article in The New York Times4 about Neil Selinger, a fifty-seven-year-old lawyer who, following retirement, had begun tutoring at the local high school. He volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, and signed up for The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, where he discovered his “writer’s voice.” Two years later, he was diagnosed with fatal amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The disease wastes your body, but your brain remains untouched by it. I know quite a bit about the disease because my character in 33 Variations died of it every night. So, for me, the appearance of this article on that day felt like a little miracle.
In an unpublished essay, Mr. Selinger described what he felt happening to him. “As my muscles weakened, my writing became stronger. As I slowly lost my speech, I gained my voice. As I diminished, I grew. As I lost so much, I finally started to find myself.”
Selinger’s writing teacher, Steve Lewis, says that his student has had to lose his lawyer’s voice and that “he’s got sort of a Zen countenance now. And it’s reflected in what he writes. He doesn’t duck anger and despair, he doesn’t duck anything, but it’s all there without self-pity. His writing is richer because his experience of the moment is richer.” Neil Selinger is the embodiment of mounting the Third Act staircase!
Slowing Down
Unlike during childhood, Act III is a quiet ripening. It takes time and experience and, yes, perhaps the inevitable slowing down.
You have to learn to sort out what’s fundamentally important to you from what’s irrelevant. A life review, which we’ll take up in the next chapter, can help you do this.
Letting Go of What’s No Longer Needed:
Flexibility and the Shift from Ego to Soul
My brother, Peter, once pointed out to me that on the Fonda family crest is the word perseverate, Latin for “persevere.” We have been proud, my brother and I, over the years, of our perseverance through some challenging times.
While I still appreciate the value of persistence, it occurs to me that in the Third Act, part of the shift from ego to soul requires flexibility more than perseverance—the flexibility, for instance, to take stock of who and what surround us and to see if maybe we should let some of it go.
Think about gardening. My daughter taught me that if I want to maximize the spring and summer blooms on the English lavender that fills my garden, I have to cut back the dead blooms of fall. Deadheading, it’s called (not the Jerry Garcia variety!). The Third Act is the time for deadheading. Like plants in the winter, we have less energy to spare trying to resurrect old, dead growth, trying to blow life into the escapades and behaviors of youth in order to prove we’re still young. I don’t want to become a hollow old fool, squandering my precious remaining life force on stuff that doesn’t serve this stage of life. It takes flexibility and a dose of courage to slough off the clutter, the gadgets, the obsessions, the pursuits, the whatever or whoever doesn’t resonate with who we are now or want to become. I understand now what it is that I really need to know and so am freer to discard the rest.
Sure, I forget things, but I also remember a whole lot of things with more vividness because I know why I want to remember them and what significance they have for my life. With age, as Stephen Levine says, we “lose memory but gain insight.”5 My time now is dependent on no one but myself, so I, myself, must be sure that the various tasks I choose to occupy my time are the right ones. I have no time to waste as I once did, going down wrong paths. If I want to make ripples, I better be sure I am throwing my pebbles into the right pond.
Getting to Essences
Like the Impressionists, by rendering life down to its concentrated essences, we can begin to live more lightly and to put our energies into activities and people who enrich what may be the only thing that still retains the capacity for growth—our spirit.
SPIRIT
It has been explained to me that soul is the substance of who a person is, while spirit—or consciousness—is a way for a person to communicate with God … which, as I see it, means becoming whole. Spirit is the uncapturable essence that makes us unique among animals.
Every other single thing in the world operates on the principle of entropy; in fact, the second law of thermodynamics says that everything is in a continual state of decline and decay (think of Arnheim’s arch). The one thing that defies this universal law is the human spirit (Arnheim’s stairway). This alone continues to evolve upward. And, like energy—which it is—spirit can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed (the first law of thermodynamics!).
The philosopher, poet, and novelist George Santayana wrote, “Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age.… Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.”
We’re all born with spirit, but for some of us it is buried deep beneath the detritus of life—violence, abuse, neglect, disease, chronic depression. That’s when addictions can happen. We become “empty chalices,” in the words of the psychologist Marion Woodman, and so we try to fill ourselves with clutter, including addictions. Psychiatrists call this “self-medicating.” For example, alcoholics try to replace spirit with spirits … alcohol. There are many other ways in which people in whom spirit is damped down seek to fill themselves: compulsive shopping, gambling, violence, workaholism, sex, drugs, food, drama. One of the great ideas of Alcoh
olics Anonymous’s twelve-step program is that we can’t be fully healed until we’ve opened ourselves to our spirit or “Higher Power.”
It took me a long time to get this. The whole “Higher Power” business used to feel so touchy-feely to me. Now that I have experienced it myself—overcoming a long-standing food addiction—I understand that it has more to do with love than it does with God (unless you understand these two as one). The humility needed to take the step of acceptance and love softens the hard, empty place at our center, permitting spirit to flood in and fill the emptiness.
A wise person—I don’t remember who—once said, “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” It takes work and intentionality to continue to grow, to ascend that staircase. In Beowulf, this is described as having “wintered into wisdom.” Wisdom is there in all of us; we just have to bring it out and fluff it up. But if we don’t address our addictions, our stagnation, or our old attitudes, or if our life goal is centered on continuing the past, remaining powerful or good-looking in the mechanistic sense, then age is a downward and very slippery slope. Eventually someone smarter and quicker supplants us at the top, the golf swing gets iffy, the old rituals become empty. While surgery can tighten the face, there’s still the giveaway neck and arms, the tendency toward postmenopausal thickening around the middle.